Dennis ShirleyThe Challenges of Education TodayI would like to tell you a little bit about the structure of the presentation that I would like to be working with you all this afternoon.

Our first big question is why is educational change so hard. Some of you are principles, some of you are school leaders, and you kind of have a great idea and you just want to get your faculty to do it, and if they would only do as they're told then it could fly, right? But then you run into obstacles and you try and figure out, ‘What's the nature of the obstacles, where does it come from, what can we do?’ And some of you are working with large complicated systems with different political agendas, different corporate agendas, different reform agendas. So first of all maybe we can spend a little time thinking about, ‘What is it that makes it so hard for us in education to get better at what we do? What are the barriers to get it better?’

And then my personal quest right now, and maybe this is why I'm with you today, is I can see a global push for very-very high achievement that I worry has been neglecting the human dimensions of education. So I want to bring in the theme of integrity: How do we know that we are really doing the best for our students? That we are viewing our students as the end of education rather than the means to something else? So, I want to tell you a little bit about some global trends.

Then I want to suggest that those strands have been driven by what I described as old imperatives, or old mandates, for change that I feel that we all have to overcome if we wanted to get to a better future.

And for that better future, we will need some new imperatives which I will be outlining for you.

And then if it all comes together, if it all works, then we will be able to have a vision of an inspiring future for educational change. And then when would we go to what we hope is our heavenly reward we can look our children and our students in the eyes and say, ‘Yes, we are human beings, we made some mistakes along the way, but in the end, we really gave you the very best that we know how we gave you.’

1. Why is Educational Change So Hard?Why is educational change so hard? Why is it hard to get better? And I don't just mean with one thing or another thing here but how our schools are supposed to be places that are continuously getting better where we can see our students are thriving.

I love this quote from John Stuart Mill writing about education: “Of all of the many-sided things, it is the one with the most sides.” Sometimes you may wake up and you might think the most important thing in education is I have to make sure that our students really are contributing to this community. But then you'll listen to a corporate presentation that says, ‘Wow, automation is coming along. What we really need to be doing now it's getting all students learning computer coding, because jobs are going to be disappearing along with automation.’ And then you have others who’ll say, ‘Well, really the most important thing is preparing our young people to contribute to our nation.’ And there is still others who will say, ‘Wow, we have climate change going, we have to kind of contribute to a better future.’ So, educational change is very confusing because there are so many different agendas out there. And you’ll notice if you're a school leader or a teacher and you’re getting many different voices coming at you, from many different angles at the same time. So how do we decide what we should really be organising our schools around?

Now, just for me, the way I like to think about these things is I just always like to ask my colleagues what’s best for our students. So, if you are a school leader your colleagues will come and they have different ideas. And they know that if they come to me, at some point I will ask them, ‘Explain to me how what you would like to have is best for our students?’ Now, you might think, ‘Ok, that's a good theoretical example.’ So, let me tell a story.

I was working in a school where the student results weren’t very good, teachers were coming and going, principals were coming and going. There was a lot of turbulence in the building. So, the teachers were very demoralised and they thought, ‘You know we need to do something fun. Our students are not going to like schools unless we like school.’ So, what they decided to do is to put on a skit. They wrote a school play and they performed it. was maybe 20 minutes long and it was a lot of fun to do. The kids liked it, the parents liked it. They said, ‘This is great.’ So, they decided to do it again the next year, but make it bigger. So, the next year they had come back, and instead of being 20 minutes long it's a 40 minutes long. They really liked that, so then they think, ‘The next year let's do another performance, let's make it an hour long, rather than 20 minutes or 40 minutes long.’ You get the idea? All of a sudden, what's happening was an effort to kind of lift morale and the teachers

are now putting all of their energy into performing in a play. Now, at some point somebody might have needed to ask, ‘Tell me how that is the best thing for our students?’ Because the teachers were so stressed out learning the lines of their play and making the costumes and doing all of those things that they've become distracted from the purpose of education. Are you with me? So, maybe you could kind of be thinking of your own schools and thinking sometimes of some ways in which the adults with our agendas can get in the way of what's best for the students. My suggestion is that this happened in a lot of schools that I've been working with.

Ideally, in the best of all possible worlds, this is what education is.

We have small number of students working closely with the teacher. It's pedagogical paradise. The students are learning academic content material, the teachers engaged with the kids, you couldn't ask for better.

But then, realistically our schools often look like this.

You have a student up here repeatedly sharpening a pencil, while another one makes faces in a window. One is combing her hair, one is drawing cartoons, one is carving up the desk. The teacher is in the upper right-hand corner staring, ignoring disruptions and planning a career change.

So, you see the difference. The reality that we often have is more like this. You're dealing with kids that have got temperamental personalities, they like to challenge you, they like to connect with their

friends there, they like to play with their iPhones. They had to do 10 million other things than to focus on their learning. So, what does this mean for teachers, when they're in this environment day after day, interacting with children?

I like to use this book a lot. I think it's one of maybe the two or three most important books written about education in the last century. Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, by Dan C. Lortie.

What Dan Lortie says is that there's three aspects, just three aspects to teachers’ professional cultures that we should be aware of.

The first one is, and here is a $10 word, presentism. If you are a teacher, you have a lot of stuff coming at you all the time. And if we're not careful, we just develop these mechanisms of responding to the latest thing that came in through the door. Or maybe you're still just out in the school parking lot, you don't even make it into the building and you're being bombarded with stimulus. And the same thing can happen to you if you are principal. So, what Dan Lortie said is that teachers become very prone to short-term thinking. You're just trying to manage this month, or maybe this week, or maybe this day, or maybe this morning, or maybe this class, or maybe the next 10 minutes, so you can get your break and get another cup of coffee and get rejuvenated… So, this is what research finds that teachers are often in a culture of presentism, short-term thinking.

The other part of what Lortie said is teachers often inhabit a culture of privatism. That means we agreed to shut the door, just let me teach, I don't want any external visitors coming in, it's my kingdom, go away. So, Lortie says this is also a characteristic of teachers work. So if you kind of imagine people working in a technology start-up where people are sharing information all the time, or even on the old-fashioned factory floor where people are assembling things together: teachers’ workplaces are often somewhat different. They are individualistic or you could say privatized.

Then, the third thing that Lortie said about teachers’ work is that teachers often become conservative. You try something new, it doesn't work, ‘Let’s go back to what I did before.’ Your principal says try another new thing, you try it out, it doesn’t work, ‘Let’s go back to what I did before.’ You try a number of different things, and then eventually you say, ‘Ok, I’m going to go back to the basic thing that works here.’ But we have to be very careful, because what we can’t be doing is going back to what helps us to manage the class, not necessarily what helps students to flourish.

The upshot from this research was that if something doesn't happen in this default culture of education, you can end up with a learning impoverished school. So, the adults come in and they perform teaching. The students come in and they perform being good students. But the learning in the whole organisation is limited. People can learn up to a certain point and then school becomes a set of routines.

What can we do about this? I think a number of different things. How do you get from a learning impoverished to a learning enriched school?

If this research is right, what you want to try and do to help your teachers to get them out of short-term thinking of presentism is to help the teachers look back at the best things that they've done and help them to project forward to where they would like to go, where they'd like to go next with their teaching, so they are not caught in short-term thinking but they have a longer time perspective. How is this all relevant right now? Well, if somebody's coming to your school saying we need 21st century skills, we’re gotta get this computer's going and all that, that can be good but just make sure that your teachers are able to hold on to the best practice that maybe they have spent years honing, getting better and better with.

And then we've done a lot with this in the US; this has been the major reform effort of recent years: trying to help colleagues to work together. It is not easy. Somehow we feel that with teaching it's a very private thing. ‘You don’t tell me how to improve my teaching and I won’t to tell you’, and we all pretend that were all great all of the time. I am trying to provoke a little bit here… How can I help people to get out of the individualism of their practice to learning together as a community? That would be collegiality.

And the third component would be a developmental perspective. So if teachers are becoming conservative, it doesn't mean that they need to become a radical, it doesn't mean that they need to become liberal, but we want to help them to develop throughout the lifespan so that they are getting better and better and better at what they do. And if we can do these things, the research which suggest, then your teachers will not want to leave the classroom, they want to come because they are flourishing, because they're getting support. Most of the international research shows that teachers leave because of inadequate support. That's what they say. So they're getting opportunities to flourish in terms of thinking of their whole life span, they’re getting opportunities to flourish because you're helping them to work together with colleagues in highly interactive teams, and they're getting together to flourish because they continue to learn across the whole life span.

We can do an assessment and we can say, ‘How well are we doing helping our colleagues to learn across the lifespan: do we help them to go back and revisit their best practices and to project forward? How well are we doing helping our colleagues to get better at their teaching: do we create opportunities for them to visit each other's classrooms? Do we help them to develop structures for giving each other feedback? And once they've received some information, do they get better at that? So, what are some of the pathways that we can explore in improving our school?’ So, you can do a lot just with this part so far. And what really happened in North America is people really got into this collegiality part, so if I have a room full of educators and I create three different corners in the room, and I asked them, ‘Ok, of these different approaches to improvement please go and stand in the corner where you feel you've been doing the most work.’, almost everybody goes over and stands by the collegiality corner. So, one of the things to think about is it a little bit like cycling when pedal is always up and one is always down. So, as we are thinking about school improvement, where are you are on your journey? And then you can think about, maybe we need to be doing something different for a while.

2. Understanding Achievement with IntegrityI have listened to your presentation today, I have learnt a lot about the Piarists. It's an amazing story. The idea that 400 years ago a school which started for children, that was free, on a daily basis, that is an amazing story. What a human achievement!

But if you have a look at the news around the world today, we see a lot of pressures on educators that will sometimes lead them to do things that are not right. So, in the US we had a number of instances of schools and school systems where there's so much pressure on the educators to get the achievement results up that they cheat. The teachers cheat. The principles cheat.

But not just in the US. On international exams, China decided to test on the international PISA test only its most affluent city, in Shanghai. It was amazing. They got the world's best results in Reading and Math and in Science, but they also tested only their very brightest students. Now if you have a country with 1.3 billion people, your best students are probably really smart. So, what's happening is it's not just individual teachers but it's also systems are learning how to game evaluation systems.

And then also in England a report came out that cheating is happening a lot. Now, it is one thing when students cheat, but it’s another thing when something is going on in the system that encourages people to cheat. What could that be and how we should cope with it?

Often in education we just decide to deny that there is a problem.

And if you think about it, it's not really that bad. Because you know it's a nice warm beach. I live in Boston and we haven't seen much sun for a long time, and you know the individual has a nice Rolex watch and some nice Italian shoes from Milano. So, it's not that bad of a situation… So if we end up with this situation, how do we find our way beyond that?

I love this article, Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting (by Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, Max H. Bazerman). What happens to people psychologically when you establish goals that they cannot reach, it's beyond their reach. In a lot of the business literature we are called to choose really big, hairy, audacious goals. But within learning, if you don't provide a lot of support along with that people become so fixated on hitting the goals that they will do almost anything to get there. So, you have a situation there of goals gone wild. Let's imagine here that we had everybody in this room was a mountaineer, and we all wanted to climb Mount Everest. And you've got oxygen tanks on your back and you're going up and you are ascending. And it's magnificent, you're going to make it. You've been training for years, and you just want to make it to the top but you're getting more and more exhausted. Your oxygen tanks giving out but you know that you can make it and you make it up to the top of Everest. It's fabulous. It's the best emotion you have ever had in your life. It's better than anything else. You just forgot one thing. You have to get back down. So, as we are thinking of our goals, it is very important to look at the goals in a broader context. And remember that we are dealing with human beings in schools.

So, how do we get out of a context that has been very goals fixated? Well, maybe we start to think about achievement in different ways.

Often, we are thinking about our students’ tested results. But we could be thinking achievement as the attainment of a worthy goal. If you have students in your school and they are really focused on

their grades and their academics, maybe one of the best things you could do for them was to get them to play a musical instrument, get them to play any sport, get them to do something outside.

And then we can also think of achievement as a result of a school or of a school system. This is what I am most interested in. And it is not just because in 2004 the Boston Red Sox, as they were playing up against the New York Yankees, they had the self-described team of idiots where nobody was really good but as a team they came together to collaborate. And schools can do that also. You could think of your school as more than a collection of individuals, it's a group of people who know how to work together well. So, we could think of achievement this way.

And now we can ask yourself, ‘What is integrity?’, when we work in our schools. You can pick up integrity as a personal characteristic. You say one thing and then you do something that goes along with that, so what you say and what you do reinforces each other. In English we say, it's a nice expression, we walk the talk. You don't say one thing and do something else. So, integrity can be a personal characteristic.

It also can be a professional disposition. I want my students to flourish. I'm devoted to my students and devoted to my students’ learning.

And then it could also be a characteristic of a system. A system supports all the students. There's been a lot of attention given to Finland in the international press. And you go to Finland, and you look at their schools and you kind of feel like, ‘Wow, it's the 1950s, there's nothing special going on here.’, but what Finland actually has created is supported by the whole society. So, that's what integrity as a school system could look like.

So, how do we relate achievement with integrity? How do we do those two things? So, you've got good moral purpose and you’ve got good student learning.

Well, I have worked in schools that have neither achievement nor integrity.

These are schools that are often struggling in urban neighbourhoods with very high poverty rates, or they are in remote rural communities. And in the US and in other jurisdictions, England, parts of Australia, parts of Canada, what you do is you get in a new principal and you hire new staff and then you have everybody working at intense speed, phenomenal speed, pounding away at student learning. But meanwhile, you're cutting corners, you’re just focusing on tested subjects. So, in the end what we often get with that scenario is low achievement and low integrity.

But then there are other schools where you might get in some of your brightest young students and you get them to work seventy-hour work weeks. We have a programme ‘Teach for America’ which is like this and it has analogues in other countries. You get them throwing everything that they have got at their instruction and they are working really, really hard. They get their achievement to shoot up for a few years. Then what happens is that people get older, all the sudden they want to start a family, all the sudden they have got children, all the sudden their parents are getting older. They need other things. So, you have created a system that produced achievement for a little time but then it gives out.

Then I think also you can have low achievement with high integrity. I worked in one school in a southern city in the US. This school always had disastrous results and the district didn't know what to do. They brought in a principal who was a minister in a local Church, to be there school principal. This minister loved everyone. He loved the students. He loved the parents. He loved his staff. I called him Dr Love. The answer to any problem in the school was more love. But there was a problem because he never had any specific strategies about how you get the school to be better, other than just more love. But actually, sometimes you need to know the academic content. You need to know different ways of teaching, different ways of assessing students.

Ant then, if we can, we try to get to high achievement and high integrity. One of my old students, Andy Bott, became the principal of Orchard Gardens K-8 school of Boston. This school was known as a principal killer. If you went in that school as a principal, you would be fired at the end of the year. The kids were turbulent, the security guards couldn't control them. The achievement was a disaster. It was right next to a big public housing project that was packed with crime. So, what did Andy do? He went in, looked at situation, and he fired all the security guards in the school. And he took that money and he did a nationwide search for the best art and music teachers he could find in the whole country. And then he took that school and transformed it into a place where if a student was misbehaving, they were given a paintbrush or they were given a saxophone or they were given something else that they could practice on and they could develop expertise on. What happened in Orchard Garden? The results go up. Because the leadership was paying attention. He took a high risk.

I also worked at a school in Hildesheim, Germany, where not that people did not want to send their children, it was a good school but it did not have any sparkle. So, the teachers got together and they said, ‘We have to improve our teaching. How can we do that? What are we looking for when we teach, anyway?’. They decided to attack this culture of privatism. And they said, ‘Well, we’re looking for an introduction that will engage the children right away. We’re looking for material that they all find relevant and engaging. We’re looking for support as a teacher’s working in the class, we’re looking for ways of giving them feedback that they’ll find precise and helpful.’ So, the teachers came up with their own protocol for how they could improve their teaching. They owned the reform, it was their reform. It was not coming from anywhere else. Then, Robert-Bosch-Gesamtschule, their achievement shot up also.

So, educational change can be hard, ladies and gentlemen, I would suggest, when we are distracted, when we are thinking about everything else than the students and their learning. Then it is very, very difficult. If we focus on the students we have in front of us, and their learning, then I think we can get to high achievement and high integrity.

So, please now if you can turn to your colleagues and discuss this question: What issue does this discussion about the relationship between achievement and integrity raise for me?

[In Spanish

I was talking to someone who asked me a question in Spanish, about the relationship between the academic results and the human development. Maybe for me it is a bit easier to talk in Spanish because I learnt it from my wife and her best friend who lives here in Santiago.]

So, we try to figure out the relationship between the development of the whole human being, which in Catholic schools you have been doing for a long time, and what is happening in other systems that are focussed very much on narrow definitions of academic achievement, which I suggest is a very limited and crippling way of thinking about education. So, I am trying to problematize it.

You do not really have to worry so much about this – yet. Yet! Because what I see is a lot of global trends start working their way into the Catholic schools that I work with. You make the best possible relationship between our struggles for achievement and integrity. You might not want what they do in South Korea which get some of the top results on international tests but the very bottom level results on how much students like being in the school. That’s one way to think about it.

What I want to suggest is that we have been working in educational change internationally, with a framework which is bankrupt, and we need to move to a new framework. That is what I will be suggesting. I will suggest that the old framework had five imperatives or theories of action, and that if we want to help our students to flourish as whole human beings for the whole world, we will have to be re-thinking education. If we can. If we can do this on a system wide level. Because a lot of the organizations that have been pushing educational change in recent years have fairly narrow economic agendas that involve defining our students as bearers of human capital. So, when students are taught, they are approached primarily for their value as future wage-earners. This can work for a while, and we certainly want our students to be as prosperous as they can. However, the suggestion here will be that if we really want to uplift the human condition for the common good, a human capital approach will not be adequate. We will have to do the hard work of imagining what kind of a future we envision for our students and for our planet. And we will have to endeavour to slay the alliance of injustice that make educational change so difficult.

3. Old ImperativesI am going to suggest that there are five old imperatives that have gotten in the way of optimizing our educational systems.

And the first one is ideological. The powerful ideology of markets and of testing.

The second one is imperial, so that educational change has been pushed a lot globally, from my own country, the United States, also the United Kingdom, putting out models of educational change that support this economic agenda.

Educational change has also been prescriptive. So, if countries did not want to follow the agenda, they would not get founding.

And then in the countries that have been pushing for a model of educational change focussed on students as wage-earners, these nations have become increasingly insular. I wrote my book on this before Donald Trump was elected president. What you see happening in the US now is that it is becoming more and more inward-looking. You can see the same thing that happened in the UK after Brexit. And the same thing may be happening in France. And this is part of a global trend. Then maybe you save yourselves. Well wait, Holland did not vote, Holland kind of helps things back, but even there the prime minister tacked a lot to a nationalist agenda. So, this is happening globally, and we have to figure out what we can do about it.

Finally, a lot of education has been instrumental. We teach our students these sets of skills, so that they can optimize these values or sets of skills in the marketplace. This is the contention that this is how we have been working now maybe for about twenty-five years in educational change. And then I try and say we have a whole bunch of things how we could be thinking about.

4. New ImperativesInstead of being driven by ideology, what does evidence tell us? And then the numbers never tell you exactly what you need to do, so you have to learn to interpret the numbers, based on your

moral vision for education. So, you have to figure out what do you really stand for, what you really care about. What are you willing to dedicate your life to? What do you want to be remembered for?

And then we have a professional imperative which is the opposite of prescriptive imperative. Teaching is so complicated that even if you wanted to tell teachers every single thing that they must do, there will be so many surprising situations that you couldn’t do it. They need to be helped to be good decision makers. How do we do that as part of a new professionalism?

And then, a global imperative. I told you already the story of my wife being here, and how we had a connection around Chile and history, that has transformed my life for the better. In our world today, young people are increasingly crossing international lines. A love this quote from Pablo Casals the cellist. He said, ‘The love of one's country is a beautiful thing. But why does that love have to stop at the border?’ And of course, in Catholic schools, there is a very strong part of the Gospel that is concerned about improving the human condition.

And then, finally, this is the one that I care the most about. Human beings need to give their lives meaning. It is not enough to earn money. It is not enough to be a good citizen. It is not enough to know a lot of stuff. Human beings need to give our lives meaning. And what can schools do to help with that? So, now I am going to run through this. [Translators, is it OK, how I am speaking? You’re Ok. Thumbs up. Great.]

Let’s go first to the ideological imperative and how we can move from a focus on ideology to a focus on evidence. Some of the younger folks in the room might not know this but back in 1973 my own government, US, was involved in overthrowing Salvador Allende here in Chile.

And the marketplace model of reform has been imposed here in Chile. It is one of the most extreme in the entire world. Chile has been improving on international assessment but the gap between the most high-achieving and the low-achieving students very strongly correlated their social class. Which has explained why the student movements here have been so strong in recent years. Chile began with these reforms but then it was really England, under Maggy Thatcher, that made the ideological program of marketplace reforms in education.

Then those spread to the United States, where they tend to be very popular in a number of states, and to Western Australia, and to even Sweden, Social Democratic Sweden. Liberia in Western Africa has contracted its entire public education system to a for profit business. Now, this happened a few months ago. And then in India and in China also we are seeing a flourishing of education defined as a profit-making business. Even in Singapore, high-achieving Singapore, 80% of students go to after-school academic programs.

So, what we are seeing is a flourishing of education as a market. A marketplace model of reform. So, how can we focus on education as a business?

And this is spreading now virally globally. Strong emphasis on accountability and students’ tested results.

So, the argument here is that this has been an ideology. In the US, it has not helped our achievement a lot, it has been flat, in England and Sweden the results have declined. So, this model is increasingly bankrupt in terms of the evidence, but it remains popular among policy makers.

So, I try to argue that we should be looking at evidence better. And if we look at evidence better, we can look at countries like Germany that looked at the numbers of these kinds of reforms and decided it was not going to pursue that path, and it is getting better. We can look at Japan, strong public education system. Norway, also has one, and Finland is the one that is most often mentioned. Switzerland, multilingual Switzerland does very well. Singapore as well, in its system. Eastern Australia, New South Wales. Kenya has decided to not allow the profiteers in, and then my favorite is Canada. Bono the Rockstar said the world needs more Canada. I think he is right. Canada managed a very strong public system, Catholic schools are part of the system, students do not have to pay any tuition. They go to Catholic schools because it is a strong public system. All schools are supported well, Canada’s achievement results are in the very top, whether you are in a public Catholic or a public non-religious school. So, Canada is a country that I think we can learn a lot from.

The components of this are strong public investment in education, investing a lot of funding in education. Focusing on the development of the whole person, the whole child, not just the future wage-earner, and focusing on education for the common good.

A big part of an argument that I am trying to present wherever I go is that we can do better than marketplace models of reform, and we really need to be thinking about them differently.

Then, one of these things is that the US projects so much power, the England projects so much power that even when the evidence is not there, other countries will often follow it.

Australia, for example, has been doing very well on international assessments, but a number of states in Australia still decided to follow what the US and the UK were doing, almost without any critical reflection. They just followed without any evidence or questioning.

Now, Germany on the other hand, Germany is an amazing story, I think, in human history. Totally bombed to smothering by 1945, today a very strong liberal democracy, accepted in over a million refugees last year. The educational system has been improving, becoming more equitable. They are not following the model. So, you don’t have to follow what is being pushed out from the US or the UK. Educators do this in good schools and in good environments anyway, they interpret evidence.

I love this book, Enseñar y aprender con interés, by Gabriel Cámara and colleagues in Mexico. They created a system of tutorial relations in schools, students coaching students, that has been highly successful in terms of their achievement results. And there are now some sixty schools in Chile that are trying out this approach. Gabriel Cámara is a former Jesuit and that feels very strongly in his educational reform. There is a lovely book called Flip the System. Flip the system, so the students are served first. Then I did this little book The Mindful Teacher, with teacher colleagues. I wonder if, in your schools, teachers get the opportunity to ever do research together, ever ask each other what it could mean for getting better in your schools. Do you ever go after a professor in a school of education, say, ‘Come and work with us.’ That’s what I have done, working with Boston public school teachers.

We can move from an imperial to an interpretive imperative.

I would like to say a little bit more about this and then we will have another turn-in talk, please. How do we get from prescription to professionalism? This is one that I am going to ask you to pay special attention to.

Remember how when Lortie talked about collegiality he meant colleagues coming and visiting each other. What has happened in a lot schools and school system, including that of Dr Love, is that it has actually turned into the principal in the building doing all of the evaluations. Now you have to do some of it as part of your job, but research actually tells us that the best way to get teacher to improve is to get them better as a team, giving each other feedback.

So, in Boston, we have done a lot of clipboarding, outside people showing up in the classroom, assessing teachers’ work, and then disappearing. That is not a highly effective strategy. In the higher education level, also, what we are doing now is a colleague will come to me and say, ‘Please, observe my teaching.”. We confer before I go to the class, I then observe the class, take meticulous notes, afterwards we discuss what happened. These are the kinds of things that if you can get up close looking at each other’s teaching that will be promising futures for us that you could ask yourselves about.

In the meanwhile, this is what is going on in sub-Saharan Africa. There are schools being run by a group called Bridge International Academy, and I saw a teacher there with an iPad. What is happening is that curriculum developers in Cambridge, MA, right across the river from where I live, where Harvard and MIT are, they develop curricula, then the teacher gets that curricula on their iPad and reads it literally to the students. There is a webcam in the classroom, telling the folks back in Cambridge what is going on with the instruction. You could see this in one way as the ultimate de-professionalization of teaching, and indeed one independent report says, ‘Bridge has streamlined their operations and has largely removed “teachers” and “administrators” from educational process all together.’ You might say, ‘Well, this is happening in sub-Saharan Africa, what does this have anything to do with me?’

Anybody recognize this?

I think the younger people are looking at the room and say, ‘Yes, that was the dinosaur, wasn’t it?’ This was an Apple IIe, and there is a great story about the Apple IIe. It was invented to be a children’s computer. I did my doctoral work at Harvard in the 1980s and when I first thought on working on it I bought an IBM computer, but then I switched over to an Apple IIe because it was easier to use. So, a computer that was originally designed to children became something that a doctoral student at Harvard was doing his dissertation on. And this was the beginning of Apple just surging and the decline of IBM.

This is a book to read, The Innovator’s Dilemma. When Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. So, what we should be paying a lot attention to in education right now is the provision of these online services where you can remove administrators and teachers from the process altogether. You might say, ‘Well, that’s so inhumane Where’s the human relations? Education is all about the relationships, the dialogue.’ Well, then you should be concerned. You should be very concerned about what is coming, because it is a lot cheaper to be designed schools in the Bridge International Academy model.

How do we try and develop our professionalism so we get passed that? Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves wrote a book called Professional Capital, and they said teachers’ professionalism resides in three components.

They need to very smart, they have to have good human capital as individuals. So, if you are a school leader, what are you doing to help your teachers to get smarter in their subject matter? What are you doing? Nothing is not an answer. What are you doing to help them to get smarter?

And then, extremely important now is the social capital. How do you help people to work together? How do you help teachers to get that place where they could go to a colleague and say, ‘I feel like a failure, I’m just no doing well enough.’ And they would not feel judged by their colleagues. That is a key question for me. We all struggle as teachers from time to time. But in many schools, teachers feel that if they confess to some vulnerability, their colleagues will judge them harshly.

Ant then, the third component, is decisional capital. How can we help teacher to get good at making really difficult decisions? Really difficult decisions. You know, you’re up there, you’ve planned a lesson you really care about, you’re presenting it, it’s dynamic, and you turn around and everybody is asleep. So, then what you do as a teacher? Do you kind of keep up on hoping it will all come together? Do you introduce something new, make a connection to somebody’s home? Do you ask them to get up and wave their arms around? What do you do? Good teachers in those situations make good judgements. So, how do we support that kind of decision making?

Now, Michael and Andy used these kind of fancy 10$ words here. At the same time the Organizations for Economic Cooperation and Development said, human capital, that’s knowledge. That is really important. That’s what teachers need. They need to be smart.

They need good peer networks. They need to know how to work together in teams and share information.

And then, finally, they need some autonomy. They need some independence. Why am I even here? Why am I even in Chile? Some of you are probably wondering about this right now. What am I doing here? So, it happened that in 1971 I was an alienated angry young man, I didn’t like school very much. I had an English teacher, her name was Mrs. Alexander, she had a big beehive hairdo, like Dolly Parton. She was pretty short. Former airline stewardess. Little bit plump. Big southern accent. And she said to me, ‘Dennis, you seem to be kind of alienated, you’re not concentrating, this a problem at school.’ And I said, ‘Yes, true.’ And she answered, ‘Why aren’t you putting together a proposal for an independent study?’ So, I put together a proposal for an independent study, and I didn’t know… You’ll be like asking a Chilean student, you know, what do you want to read. Maybe they say, ‘I want to read something like Pablo Neruda, I keep hearing about him.’ We didn’t have Pablo Neruda, but we had Herman Melville, who wrote Moby Dick. So I said, ‘Mrs. Alexander, I want to read Moby Dick.’ There is a point to this story, just bear with me. So, I read Moby Dick over the Christmas break, I came back in early January. She says, ‘Dennis, so you’re ready to get started reading Moby Dick?’. And I said, ‘I've already read it, Mrs. Alexander.’ She said, ‘Great, what is the first sentence?’. Does anybody know the first sentence of Moby Dick? It’s, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Does anybody know who Ismael was in the Bible? Who knows? You do, Sir? Keep up your hand. You’ve just won a free book.

[In Spanish. Who is Ishmael? ‘The brother of Isaac.’ Their father? ‘The son of Abraham.’ And their mother? ‘The slave woman, Hagar.’ What is the story of Ishmael? What is his situation in this family? ‘His mother was going to die because of hunger, so the angel had to…, God had compassion of her, and gave her a way of this situation.’ Thank you very much, Sir.]

So, the story, if I understand it correctly, is that Sarah is not able to have a baby, and then in her seventies, God blesses her womb and gives her Isaac. But meanwhile, earlier on, Sarah had said, ‘Abraham, you’re supposed to be a Biblical patriarch and you don’t have any children. The whole story is not going to work, unless you have a son.’ You cannot be a patriarch without a son. So, then, she said, ‘Why don’t you sleep with the slave girl, Hagar?’ To which he then says, ‘Ok.’. He is very agreeable. Then he sleeps with her, and then they have this son Ishmael. Then all of a sudden, here

is Isaak. So, then, Sara says, ‘This Hagar-Ismael thing is no good. Get rid of them, please.’ And Abraham says, ‘Do I have to?’. And she says, ‘Yes, you have to.’. So, then he kicks them out. And then they are out in the desert. And the Bible says of Ismael, ‘His hand shall be raised against every man’s hand.’ He is the alienated son. He is the son who has been rejected by his father. Any of you have any students like that in your schools, alienated young men? Angry, don’t feel like they fit in, oppositional, want to fight back? So, he is out in the desert, abandoned by his father. We have a lot of theologians here, so I am hesitant to say this, but I understand that Ishmael means in ancient Hebrew, ‘God hears’. God hears. God hears Ishmael, hears his cries, hears his mother’s cries. And they are delivered.

Now, why do I tell you this story? Who cares? Because I had an English teacher, ladies and gentlemen, who taught me that if you want to understand the world, you have to decode it. I had read the whole book, I did not understand it. Now I understood that if you want to understand the world, you have to really work at it, you have to know about it, you have to have a teacher who cares, a teacher who looks out and says, ‘You’re not with this group. How are we going to connect to you?’ That’s why I’m here. That’s why I testify I had a magnificent teacher. So, please, turn to your colleagues now, and discuss, is this a good way forward as we think about profession today? Thank you.

[In Spanish. Please, talk among yourselves.] – 1:30:18

So, these are some things that you may be thinking about as we continue with this conference and as you head back home. Basically, the issue here is, is teaching a profession or is it something else?

Decades ago an American sociologist wrote a book called the Semi-professions. Kind of half of a profession. He said, people have some expertise, they know stuff, but some like being a surgeon, some like being a judge, it’s looser than that. I see that we need to say that teaching is a profession, that there is a specialized body of knowledge. I have a niece. My sister adopted a little girl from Russia, who had pseudo alcohol symptoms, not pseudo alcohol syndromes. The person who noticed this and observed this was a teacher. My sister is highly educated, but she needed a teacher who could identify these symptoms. That is professional knowledge. And if we are going to protect our schools in the decades ahead, we are going to have to figure out how to communicate to the public our professionalism better.

I have two more imperatives. Please, just bear with me, and then we’ll just wrap this whole thing up.

How do we help people in the world to understand that we get more out of interacting with each other than retreating into our rabbit holes of nationalism and xenophobia? How do we do that?

One thing that we have to do is get rid of the wall in your head, der Mauer im Kopf. This was an expression that used to be used by Germans when the Berlin wall was still up. It meant that you had a wall in your head, and you separated yourself off from other people, even in your very own country. I was talking to one of the colleagues who said here, ‘I like to go to where the abandoned places are. I like to go to serve where nobody else is willing to go.’ I work in a Jesuit college and university. I applaud my Jesuit friends and colleagues for their courage to go to the toughest neighborhoods on the planet.

These are Syrian children. Children. So, how do we help these children for let them know that they have a place in this world also.

UNESCO came out with this report which I love. Which if you do not know about I recommend. It is written in Spanish. Learning: The Treasure Within.

UNESCO said we need to do four things in the twenty-first century. We need to know, we need to be smart. We need to know how to make things. That is very important. We need to be constructive. But third, this is very courageous, I thought. Here, you really see a separation from human capital theories of education. We need to know how to be. How should I be in the world? How can I work on being a better person? Not being selfish? Caring for others? Caring for the natural environment?

And then what UNESCO said was going to be most important for our century, the fourth one. Learning to be together.

So, look at how magnificent you, guys, are. You are from all over the world. That is the future. We are in this network of mutual dependency. What a thrill! And you are tied together by your faith, and by core convictions, that you want to put into action. How exquisite! What more could you ask from life than that, to be with like-minded colleagues who care about the human condition, who have a message of redemption and sacrifice?

A lot of people do not even know that in the UN the countries of the world have passed a Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which guarantee, on paper, every child the right to free high-quality education. And the right to play! Remember Maria Montessori? Play is children’s work? The right to play. How do we build that into our schools so that children can play freely, not directed by the adults, but self-directed play?

I love this German word, we don’t have a translation for it in English. Weltoffenheit. Openness to the World. The closest thing I have seen to that is being openminded. But it is a different thing. Being open to the world, being curious about others, learning other languages, that’s part of what you are doing. Openness to the world.

And then, this is magnificent, if you haven’t read it, by Pope Francis, Our Common Home, focusing on our endangered planet. So, it is interesting. Earlier I said that the real question should be asking what is best for our students. But I mean that in a very long-term sort of way. What kind of world are passing on to our children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren? It is a beautiful document.

So, how do we take care of our whole planet? Then, finally, this one. How do we move from thinking about our own students in instrumental terms to understanding that they are human beings who want to view life with meaning and purpose and beauty? How do we do that?

Hard, in the current context, when so much is going the other way.

So much of what is happening in our schools today is what Gert Biesta calls learnification, turning all our schooling into learning to prepare for test and competition.

Maybe life could be more than that. Which is what Mrs. Alexander taught me.

But of course, we all have to deal with what Juan de la Cruz called La noche oscura del alma. How do I help our students to understand that you can have crises in your life from time to time? You have a crisis of faith. There is somebody who was your best friend who betrays you. A good friend could have a brain tumor. A good friend could be killed by a drunk driver. A good friend could die of kidney failure. A month ago one of my best friends was teaching a spinning class, a cycling class, he was fifty-seven years old, and had a massive heart attack and died in the middle of the class. His wife was in the class. How do we help each other to understand that being human is challenging? It has many different dimensions that surprise us. Well, it means that we should not just tell students that everything is supposed to be fun, to be a full human being means some struggle, it means some challenges.

And then, we can be redeemed.

Let’s listen to our students’ voices. I love this. This is from a Canadian student, who said: “Don’t give up on us. Even though we aren’t always easy and we know your jobs are really hard, please don’t give up on us!”

You know some students in your own school who could say that to you? The students who are really struggling, they challenge you all year long and then finally when it’s the vacation time and they come back up to your school because they have nowhere else to go? Right? So, how do we find the courage to continue the work with those students?

Now, I am a very fortunate, and I am a very privileged person, but I have always loved this memoir from Primo Levi, of his time in Auschwitz in the concentration camp in 1944 and 1945. Se questo è un uomo. This is my last story of our presentation. There is a chapter there where Primo Levi is told to go and get lunch for the other camp inmates. And he is going with a young man from France and the young man, Jean, says he wants to learn some Italian from Primo Levi. And at this point, most of the other Italian prisoners have been killed off, so there is two languages left in the camp, there is German and there is Polish. Jean says, ‘Could you please teach me some Italian?’ And so, Primo Levi decides he wants to quote from Dante’s Inferno.

And he says these lines:

‘Considerate la vostra semenzaFatti non foste a vivir come brutiMa per seguir virtute e canoscenza.’

‘Consider from what noble seed you spring:You were created not to live like beasts,But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.’

And Primo Levi struggling to remember these lines, and he finally remembers these lines, and then he says, ‘It was like the sound of a trumpet call. It was like the voice of God. For a moment, I forgot where I was and what had been done to me.’ Now, that’s an education for purpose and meaning when you are struggling. That is such a beautiful passage.

And when I was in Venice in the fall I went over to this little graveyard island San Michele, and look what I found.

There is me and there is a graveyard, a cemetery.

‘Fatti non foste a vivir come brutiMa per seguir virtute e canoscenza.’ (Dante Alighieri)

So, I wonder what you are giving in your schools, what you are giving to your kids. It should reflect your cultural heritage. It should reflect your values. We need the diversity of the world’s cultures. We desperately need those. There’s so many things, so many expressions, that even though I love the English language, I heard one of the colleagues today use this Spanish word profundizar. You cannot translate profundizar into a verb in English, but you can only say to go deeper. Now, we have profound but we don’t have profundizar. Isn’t that just the most beautiful bouquet you could ever ask for? What that word does? It just opens up so many possibilities.

So, let’s give our kids poetry. Let’s give them art. Let’s give them music. Let’s give them wonderful physical education. Let them enjoy all the different dimensions of being a human being. And if we can do it the right way, as professionals, we get really good at studying evidence, we get smart at looking at it. But then, we hold on to our core values, we say a lot more about the evidences, what our convictions are, so we become better at interpreting the evidence. And then, we’ll say, in our little school, in our little network, it’s not enough, we have to care about the whole profession. And we need to care about teachers in Ghana, teachers in Indonesia, teachers in Peru, teachers in Venezuela today – how are they surviving, how are they making it? And then we have to uplift this whole profession around the world wherever teaching and learning maybe going on. And understand it is our responsibility to be global citizens, cosmopolitan citizens. And get rid of the curse of nationalism and xenophobia and withdrawing and building walls all of these other things that get into the way of our shared humanity. We can do these things and we can embellish our lives with meaning, beauty, purpose, and we can tell our students that we love them because they are fellow human beings and that we care about their future. And they will feel that love and they will aspire to be good and they will aspire to make their contribution to the human condition.

And if we can do all those things, we can recover the grandeur of education. So, please don’t ever say, ‘I’m only a fourth-grade teacher.’ Please never ever say, ‘I am only a principal.’ Please never ever say, ‘I am only an educator.’ What is Mrs. Alexander had said that she changed my life? She died thirty years ago, she is still alive for me today!

This is our challenge, this is our cause. We need to unite as a profession, come together to help one another in multi-racial, multi-lingual communities of learning and practice. We need to be mindful, get better about thinking of what we are doing. But we also have to understand at the same time that it is important to act, you cannot just reflect forever.

And if we can do these things, we will leave footprints in the sand of time. And here is one thing you cannot do with your life. You cannot not leave a legacy. You leave a legacy. Every single one of us. So, what will that legacy be? I know what yours will be, because you, guys, are part of a great network and you inspired me when I was listening to the presentations earlier today. We are going to uplift the human condition, we are going to let our students know that we care deeply about them, we are going to improve peace, security and safety on our planet. Thank you for letting me have your time this afternoon.

Questions and answers

Q.: This year I have discovered that Finland, a country you have mentioned a lot, which has got one of the best systems of education, also is the number one in the number of suicides of young people. This is the real part of what you were talking about, that they have very good statistics at the educational level, but when I realized that it is the country with most suicides in Europe, then I met this aspect. So it does not seem to be real for me that a country with one of the best system in the world should have this situation of its youth.

A.: Great question! Magnifico! We should always ask these critical questions. Fabulous. There is a joke that the Finns tell about themselves, and it goes like this. How do you know if you are with an extraverted Finn, another-directed Finn? And the answer is, you are with an extraverted Finn, he is staring at your shoes. The introverted is staring at his shoes. The way I experienced Finnish culture is it is very Nordic, they have very short summers there, and they drink a lot. And they are very close to Russia, and so there is this expression that was used in the 60s by a German reporter. He talked about Finnlandisierung. And what that means is that when you kind of show to the big Russian neighbor that you are not a threat by not publishing certain books, not putting them in your library, not showing certain kinds of movies. So I think that is something that is happening in a culture if there is a lot of repression within the culture. Because we cannot be repressed permanently, then you go on with these drinking binges, you go up to a cab in the woods with a friend, and you just drink like crazy for three days. I think that that is something that is a dark part of the Finnish story. Basically, then, what I would think is what we always need to be careful about is which countries get chosen the be the exemplars; which countries get chosen to be the countries that everybody else is supposed to be like. Because even though I do some of that, I put in the interpretive imperative because I do not want us to be the slaves to data. Now, personally, I like more Mediterranean cultures more, so I was very happy when a couple of weeks ago a report came out on the country where people live the longest of any country. Does anybody know which one it is? It will surprise you. It’s Italy. Why is it Italy? Fresh seafood, glass of red wine, close by the Ocean, care a lot about family, you have a madman as the prime minister, it doesn’t matter, it’s not important. When I was over there after Trump was elected, I was talking to a waiter, and he says, ‘How are you doing?’, and I said, ‘It’s so terrible, I’m so depressed we have Trump.’. He says, ‘Don’t worry about it. We had Berlusconi!’ It’s kind of interesting, right? What are the things that we just have to learn to take in and strive, learning to cope, learning to manage. But if you decided that, on the basis of your values,

life is sacred, I think you can learn a lot of things from a country like Italy. And I would never ever get Italy to imitate Germany. That’s one thing that is not going to happen. I don’t care how high their test score result are. There is this story of what I like about Italian culture. Now, if my wife was here she would say, ‘Please, don’t let them get started on talking about Italy.’, but she is not here. Ok. I was talking to my Italian students in the fall, and they say, ‘These international tests like PISA, these tests are entirely stupid.’ I said, ‘Why?’, and they said, ‘We don’t do any of those kinds of tests in our schools. None, niente.’ I said, ‘Ok, what kind of an assessment do you do?’ ‘A lot of conversations.’ So, they do these things, “fare la interrogazione”. So, the teacher asks the students questions and that’s how they assess the knowledge. So, then I said, ‘That’s interesting. Where does this come from?’ They said, ‘Oh, from Cicero.’ A two-thousand-year-old tradition. Do we want a world where the Italians give up that tradition so they can do better on international tests? I don’t. I want a world where there is all this rich diversity of the world’s cultures and they are reflected in the schools. And that’s what we really need to hold on to right now. Look at the international evidence, don’t worship that, think instead what kind of a society do you want to be in. What kind of a world do you want to pass on the young people? That would be my request to you. I’ve got to warn you, guys, are you disposed to stand between these good people till dinner? Because I am a professor, we don’t have to talk…

Q.: Thank you, Professor, for this wonderful sharing. How can a country like India find the balance between achievement and integrity? Because in India education is a market, each school is competing, they are looking for achievement. And the people are looking for a school because they want to reach their goals.

A.: Thank you so much for the question. Now, can I just be completely honest? Some of what I am trying to do is just to identify the question, the achievement and integrity question. So, I think it would be wrong to say that any school that is a private school cannot have integrity. If so, you should throw me out, because I teach in a private Jesuit institution. It’s more the issue of the culture within the schools and within the building. So, what is the nature of the relationship between the students and the teacher, and the relationship between the teachers among one another, and between the teachers and the parents? My plea is that we work to embellish those relationships with an ethic of care, with consideration of the larger issues that are facing all of us as people. We can’t always choose what kind of a school we work in, what kind of a community, or what nation, but what we can is always circle back around to the core values. And for me the core value is the nature of the interpersonal relationship within the larger miracle of creation. How do we help our young people to experience some of that? So, I would be deceiving you if I was to say I have the answers to these issues. In the Socratic dialogues, they almost always end with a confusion, which I think is a good model for us. There is one dialogue where Meno says to Socrates, ‘You know, Socrates, whenever I’m with you, it’s like I’ve been stung by a stingray.’ And then Socrates says, ‘Well, I understand, if that’s true I’m a strange kind of stingray, because not only do I paralyse you, I also paralyse myself.’ But the point there is kind of raising doubt, raising questions, getting a stinging in terms of big ideas. So, I think it’s possible within schools to do a lot. Think of the best conversations that you've had with colleagues and how you remember them, you know maybe years later.

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,They brought me bitter words to hear and bitter tears to shed.I wept them as I remember'd how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,Still are those gentle voices, those nightingales, awake;For Death, he taketh all away, but those word he cannot take.

Isn’t that great? That’s Callimachus, was written in Greek, then translated into Latin, then translated into English. That tells us a story. It was written around the 3rd century before Christ. Tells us about the impact that a good friend can have on your life.

Q.: Thank you for your conference, for your presentation. There is a passage in the encyclical Gaudium et spes, of the Second Vatican Council, that says, the future of humanity is in the hands of those who are able to give the youth reasons for living and reasons for hoping. Do you think that education can give reasons for living and reasons for hoping? And what would be these reasons for living and hoping?

A.: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I love that, Noche oscura del alma. [In Spanish: Because is an expression of our conclusion, our doubt, our interior struggles, and all those things.] I guess a reason for living, for that is the question, is to participate, the connections for one’s soul to another, that can give our lives so much beauty and meaning. And a reason for waiting, for hoping – esperar es ambos, ¿no? –, it is to wait and to hope. That’s good. Maybe because in the fullness of time aspects of life are revealed to us and so having some patience and then being open to grace, or we were discussing charism, which is I saw one of the gifts, it’s a spiritual gift. This is very important for educators, we have to be open to the spiritual gifts that our students might be willing to give to us. We have to be open to that. We cannot so busy with what we want to say or do that we don’t understand the message that they might be giving to us. I don’t know why this is but I’m thinking of my daughter now, who asked me one day, ‘Daddy, were Moses and Martin Luther King friends?’ You know, the words of children, what they put together… I went to a local school recently, and I was reading to eight year olds, and they were all immigrant children, and my grandmother was an immigrant, that’s something that a lot of Americans seem to have forgotten. My grandmother was born in Ireland, her mother died in Ireland, her father came over to Canada, then he got on a train to go to San Francisco to move the family out, he got pneumonia, he died. So my grandmother was an orphan now in Canada. But then an American Methodist minister was visiting Canada, saw this situation, and adopted her, and brought her down to the US. So, I was teaching these immigrant children, and I told them a story and then I read them some story about immigrants. And I thought, ‘This is great, we can have a connection, immigrants, moving, culture, languages, it’s gonna be great. And then they write me these thank you card. ‘Dear Dr Shirley, we are so sorry that your grandmother died.’ Isn’t that beautiful? They were going right for the human connection, they didn’t have all these theories. So, if you can be open to those moments, los pequeños milagros de nuestros estudiantes. And maybe especially the students who are the most hardened, the most difficult, the ones who make it hard for you to sleep, and who are the same ones who need you so much. And in their fight, they are trying to find a way in the world. So, I just want to thank you so much for what you do every day, and for keeping this vision alive, and for teaching me that the first free school that was open to all children – and they included Jewish students, I understand? – was started in Rome, by this Order, 400 years ago now. What a gift to the world! Thank you for that!

Q.: We have been reflecting upon the integral formation with a successful achievement in the life of the students. I would like to connect with our Founder, Saint Joseph Calasanz, one of the pioneers of education, who first thought of the integral formation of the students. Looking at the global tendencies, I am a little scared as an educator, as a Calasanctian, to apply this methodology of integrity with success in our schools, because there is a tendency from the part of the families that they believe when they pay a lot for education, they’ll receive quality education. So, in the case of our schools, the Pious Schools, where we insist on free education, and even if we give the best education freely, it is not taken as a value. So, we are in a complex situation. We would like to give the best education, and if it is freely given, it is not valued. What are your experiences in this?

A.: Thank you for the question. This is the crie de cœur, a cry from the heart of the educator, who is not fully appreciated. I try to think of working with parents as a developmental process, just like working with students is. When parents are acting that way, I try to understand. There is a lot going on in the world right now that would make them afraid for their children’s future. There’s a lot. What’s going to happen now with self-driving vehicles? Think of the massive unemployment that will be coming in five to ten years with that. Think of all the other forms of automation that are coming. I understand why parents are afraid. On the other hand, if they get too narrow with their focus, they won’t be preparing their children to be agile. In my university, in Boston College I get students from, remember the thing that was high achievement, low integrity? So, I get students who march have been marched through years and years at schools told what to do and the parents were always watching what they were doing. And they get to university and they fall apart, because they don’t know how to do things independently. They don’t have taken any risks, they’re very, very insecure. And now it’s very strange, we’re studying the rise of the pression and the anxiety and it’s the highest among the poorest students and the wealthiest students. The wealthiest, the most privileged ones have very, very high rates of the pression and anxiety, because their parents won’t let them breathe. There’s a scene in a movie, with Robin Williams or Steve Martin, where you see these parents talking, and saying, ‘You have to do this, you have to do this, because otherwise, you know, your future’s doomed, and you have to make sure you get into Stanford or Harvard or Colombia.’ And then the camera moves and the parents are talking to a two-year-old. And you get that hyper anxiety projected upon the child. Now, I feel fortunate because I grew up in a world in which it was still possible to go out in nature, go for a walk, get lost in the woods, waste time. Isn’t that wonderful when you just let the afternoon… Who’s that, Neruda, right? Leaning into the afternoon. Leaning into the afternoon. You know, you don’t rush it. And Neruda – I love his autobiography, he was a complicated person, but let’s not go to some of those parts –, he said that the secret of being a poet is having time to pay attention to the things that nobody else notices because they’re all too busy. How do we create that mental space where we can start noticing things that are might be right in front of you, you just don’t pay attention to, because we are hurrying off to the next thing. It is very important to take that time. Can we do that? I don’t know that we can. Because everything is in overdrive now. Everything is speeding up. This is the new big word, accelerationism. Everything has to go faster, we have to have it immediately. So, I wonder if there is ways, and there are, they’re called retreats… You go on a prayer retreat, you go on a meditative retreat, where you can withdraw from the world, and re-connect, and profundizar la vida, profundizar las experiencias. You go deeper, gravitas, depth, s-l-o-w d-o-w-n t-i-m-e. I had another teacher… Sorry, you have to stop me. At sixth grade we had a teacher, he taught us Einstein’s theory of relativity. I was twelve. He said, ‘Ok, the universe is expanding, but there are some people who say that the expansion of the universe is slowing down.’ And then he explained us how time and space are related, I could figure out that time could slow down because I knew it always did on Friday after lunch when the week ends. I just knew that time could slow down, right? But then he said to us, ‘Maybe time could slow down so

much that time could stop.’ And he gave me the greatest gift of my twelve-year-old life. Which was, I was in the stage that Jean Piaget calls formal operations, where you are figuring out that there are rules in the world. ‘No, time can’t stop.’ He let us argue with him. He even let us argue with him for an hour after school. That was 1966! This is 2017! He gave me this gift, which was I didn’t stay after the school because I wanted to play with my friends, I got to stay after to argue with a teacher. About whether time could stop?! Well, you want to know how to get your students to become teachers? Do that. Just throw a crazy idea on them and let them without you and then stay afterwards. It changed my life.