John Taylor Gatto’s career as a school teacher began in 1965 when he borrowed his roommate’s teaching license and began working as a per diem substitute in New York City. He went on to become the city’s Teacher of the Year three years in a row and then New York State Teacher of the Year. But Gatto didn’t care for being in the public spotlight, and he ended his teaching career in 1991 with a now famous resignation letter published in the Wall Street Journal.

In the letter, he criticized the public school system for teaching what he called “a curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency.”

Since then, Gatto has traveled across the country talking about the need to overhaul America’s public education system. He’s also written numerous books, including Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Instruction.

He’s a strong advocate of homeschooling. His books left a profound impression on me and were a key influence in my decision to homeschool my own kids.

On one of his visits to California, I sat down with him to talk about the trouble with America’s schools. We spoke at length about his experiences as a school teacher. I was especially curious to know how his students managed to win New York State’s essay contest year after year. His answer surprised me but also revealed an essential truth about our public education system.

“A girl came to me early on in my teaching career,” Gatto said. “She wanted to enter a congressman’s essay contest. I don’t know if she wanted to win a trip to Washington or a gold star. ‘Why are you wasting your time chasing these prizes?’ I asked her. ‘There are so many worthwhile things to do.’ But she pressed the point. So I said I would help her. I couldn’t promise that she would win, but I could guarantee that she would be in the finals.”

“How could you guarantee that?” I asked. “After all, there were some fifty schools in the running for the prize.”

“Here’s what I told her,” he continued. “‘You have to follow my instructions to the letter, and it’s going to be a lot of work for you. I want you to take a week off from school. I’ll cover for you. I want you to research the congressman’s career from the beginning. I want to know what college he went to, his earliest public speeches, and what he is famous for. He’s going to give this award to somebody who agrees with him. And no one your age will be able to agree with him other than in some generic fashion. But you are going to agree with everything he said at the time when he was class president in 3rd grade. You’re going to research this man and find out what his hot-buttons are.’”

“Isn’t that a rather cynical way to go about it,” I protested.

“If that sounds cynical, Scott, let me tell you that’s as idealistic an enterprise as I can think of,” he shot back. “It’s showing people how to pull the screen back and see for themselves how the system really works.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “What happened?”

“Well, she did in fact win the trip to Washington (or whatever it was he was giving away). And a couple of her friends won second and third place. My students did this year after year. My kids were the valedictorians of the school. Our school gives the valedictorian prize not for the highest average but for the best speech.”

“What did you tell your kids about giving good speeches?” I asked.

“I said, first of all, that we would have to practice giving speeches in the auditorium, because they don’t want to pick someone for valedictorian who is going to embarrass them by freezing up on stage. So I got a key from the custodian — he was Irish, so it took three bottles of whiskey — and we made a master so that we could do all our practicing in the auditorium. Then I told them they had to know exactly what the committee believed. The committee was made up of a social studies teacher, a science teacher, and the principal. They had gone on record many times about who they were and what they believed. I said to the kids, “you’re going to say in your speech that who they are is the best of all, that’s how you’re going to be valedictorian.’”

Gatto registered the concerned look on my face. “Well,” he added, “you don’t actually believe that anyone in charge of giving a prize could give it to someone who contradicts their dearest, most cherished beliefs, do you? It would be madness.”

Well, I couldn’t disagree with him. And, in fact, what he said opened my eyes to an essential truth about awards and honors — that oftentimes they are given to those who express or exemplify what the award-givers themselves most fervently believe.

What Gatto was telling me — and who can deny the truth of it? — is that awards say more about the people who give honors than it does about those who receive them. This is a subject I want to come back to in future post.

For more on John Taylor Gatto, go to Wikipedia or his official website.

“New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything,” wrote Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient.

It’s a bittersweet fact of life — and a recurring theme in literature, film and the arts — that we start out reckless and clumsy in matters of the heart. Learning how to love and be loved takes time and the process is often a painstaking one.

For psychotherapist and author David Richo, the process can hold the key to inner healing and transformation. He makes this point in his bestselling book, How to Be an Adult in Relationships. 

Relationships are a journey, he says. They test us, they prod us, they give us a chance for self-reflection and growth. Approaching them with maturity, patience, and a sense of selflessness creates a new paradigm for embracing the inevitability of their ups and downs.

In the fall of 2010, I sat down with him to explore this idea and what it takes — in the most practical terms — to develop mature and lasting relationships. Filmmaker Russ Spencer has crafted our conversation into a standalone interview now available on DVD through Depth Video.

The interview is described as “a thoughtful and nuanced two-hour discussion rich with clarity and inspiration,” one that “offers couples, or anyone experiencing the difficulties that relationships inevitably bring, a trusted advisor through the turbulence.”

You can order a copy directly from the Depth Video website, or through Amazon.com. Here’s the trailer:

Huston Smith has had a profound influence on me. He introduced to me the idea that there is an identifiable transcendent unity at the core of the enduring wisdom traditions — a common vision as to the nature of ultimate reality, knowledge, ethics, and spiritual life — despite the great surface variety of doctrines, practices, and cultures. He refers to it as the “primordial tradition” or “perennial philosophy.”

I had encountered the idea of the perennial philosophy from Aldous Huxley (his book by that name is one I keep at my bedside), but I never realized the extent to which people of various mystical traditions shared a common vision. I found that deeply thought-provoking, and more than a little inspiring.

This outlook is common to people everywhere and at all times, Smith says, with a single notable exception: the modern West. Our contemporary Western worldview differs from what might otherwise be called “the human unanimity,” as he calls it, because of an unfortunate “misreading” of science.

In several of his books, he shows how science presumes to be the authoritative way of establishing truth, yet ultimately reveals only partial truths. Strictly speaking, Smith says, a scientific worldview is a contradiction in terms since the world science deals with is one limited to space, time, matter/energy, and mathematics. “Values, life meanings, purposes, and qualities slip through science like sea slips through the nets of fishermen.”

The triumphs of modern science have blinded us to the fact that it is an inherently restricted form of knowing, that what can be measured empirically is not exhaustive of reality, that there are other higher domains that can be apprehended only through contemplation, intuition, and inner experience.

According to Smith, this latter idea stands at the center of all the great wisdom traditions, from Taoism to Vedanta, Zen to Sufism, Neoplatonism to Confucianism. The primordial tradition views reality as hierarchically ordered, consisting of at least three realms: earth, human, and celestial, correlated with body, mind, and spirit.

This suggests, in effect, that 1) things are not as they seem, 2) that the other-than-the-seeing represents infinitely “more,” 3) that this more cannot be known in ordinary ways, 4) that it can, however, be known in ways appropriate to it, 5) that these appropriate ways require cultivation, and 6) that they require tools or practices. (For more on this last point, please see my post on Spiritual Practice.)

Smith has helped me recognize that the best hope for Western culture is not to go back to some idealized past, but to retrieve a more expanded and timeless view of reality, to recover a lost dimension of human understanding. In his words, we need “to reknit the rich coherence of a fully human consciousness which the cramped and aggressive rationality of modernity has bruised so badly.”

For more on Huston Smith, please see my review of his book Beyond the Postmodern Mind

The Creative Community: Scott London from The Santa Barbara Channels.

When his English showed little sign of improvement, the nuns at his school asked Rodriguez’s parents to speak more English at home. Eager to help their son, his mother and father complied. “Ahora, speak to us en inglés,” they would say. Their effort to bring him into the linguistic mainstream had far-reaching results. Rodriguez went on to earn a degree in English at Stanford and one in philosophy at Columbia. He then pursued a doctorate in English Renaissance literature at Berkeley and spent a year in London on a Fulbright scholarship.

Though Rodriguez had his sights set on a career in academia, in 1976 he abruptly went his own way, supporting himself through freelance writing and various temporary jobs. He spent the next five years coming to terms with how education had irrevocably altered his life. His first book The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, published in 1982, was a searching account of his journey from being a “socially disadvantaged child” to becoming a fully assimilated American, from the Spanish-speaking world of his family to the wider, presumably freer, public world of English. But the journey was not without costs: his American identity was only achieved after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. “Americans like to talk about the importance of family values,” says Rodriguez. “But America isn’t a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.”

While the book received widespread critical acclaim and won several literary awards, it also stirred resentment because of Rodriguez’s strong stands against bilingual education and affirmative action. Some Mexican Americans called him pocho — traitor — accusing him of betraying himself and his people. Others called him a “coconut” — brown on the outside, white on the inside. He calls himself “a comic victim of two cultures.”

Rodriguez explored the dilemmas of ethnicity and cultural identity more directly in his second book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. “The best metaphor of America remains the dreadful metaphor [of] the Melting Pot,” he wrote. The America that he described is a new cross-fertilizing culture, a culture of half-breeds, blurred boundaries, and bizarre extremes.

I spoke with Rodriguez about the dilemma’s of cultural identity and the “browning” of America in an interview that has been widely published over the last ten years. It appears in a new book, The Little Brown Reader, edited by Marcia Stubbs, Sylvan Barnet, and William E. Cain. It has also been given new life by The Sun magazine in a section online called “Favorites from the Archives.”

• Read the interview
• Listen to an audio clip
• The Sun: Favorites from the Archives

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Scott London: You say that ”we live only part of the life we are given.” What do you mean by that?

Michael Murphy: There is more and more evidence today that all of us have enormous unused potentials. For example, a big article in the American Psychologist entitled “Expert Performance” reviewed dozens of studies about abilities that were once thought to be genetically determined, such as perfect pitch, or the ability to remember strings of numbers on a single hearing, or various athletic skills. These studies have shown that with training everybody can learn perfect pitch, can learn to extend their short-term memory, and can expand their athletic abilities. And those are just physical abilities. There are also emotional capacities, cognitive skills, and spiritual abilities. Every single human attribute gives rise to the extraordinary — among men and women, young and old, in all cultures.

London: How do they “give rise to” these extraordinary abilities?

Murphy: For example, we can extend all of our senses. Some wine tasters can make 10,000 discriminations, and there are perfume testers who can make 30,000 discriminations. People can train their eyesight to far greater acuity than was once thought possible. There is enormous evidence that there is extra-sensory perception, as well. You can train remote viewing, as they did at the Stanford Research Institute.

That is just perception. You can extend that to other attributes as well, such as our ability to love. We can learn to love by the practice of love. Or our relation to pain and pleasure. Anybody who has been to these pain clinics can learn to control pain. We can also learn to induce states of pleasure.

There are so many ways to categorize our human faculties. But no matter how you map it, whatever attribute you look at, there is a body of research that shows it can be cultivated and that it can become extraordinary.

London: You’ve analyzed records from the Roman Catholic Church that show that worship and contemplation often produced extraordinary experiences.

Murphy: Yes, Roman Catholicism, more than any other religious tradition, has tried to sift out the evidence for these extraordinary abilities. They put their saints on trial in the canonization proceedings and put witnesses on oath. It’s a mortal sin to lie to the Congregation of Rights that do these investigations.

What they have dug up is the fact that there have been about 300 Roman Catholic women and a few men who have had the marks of Jesus Christ on their hands and feet, marks that simulate those of Christ’s crucifixion. Typically these things either ache or bleed every Friday or perhaps every Good Friday.

There are other kinds of stigmata, as well. In the Muslim world, there are the two saints who have had the battle wounds of Mohammed appear on their back.

In these cases, the mind identifies with or conceives of a particular bodily image and translates it with enormous specificity into the flesh. This is, again, another example of mind over matter, of the influence of imagery on the body.

The Roman Catholic tradition has sifted this body of data most carefully. But the biggest catalog of these powers exists in Hindu and Buddhist lore, where they are called “siddhis.” Charisms and siddhis are great pointers to what I see as our untapped greater potential. I’m convinced there are thousands of these abilities.

London: You also talk about sports as an area of human transcendence. In fact, in an article you called sports an “American equivalent of Yoga.”

Murphy: Yes, I’ve written a couple of books about that. The more you look into high skills in sport, the more you realize that mind enters. A lot of top athletes develop their physical skills, but they can’t compete with certain other athletes who have a great mental game. In golf, for example, Ben Hogan had great physical skills, but he also had a great mental game. The same with Jack Nicklaus. But there were other golfers whose swings were just as good — even more beautiful — but they didn’t have the mental discipline, the mental strength, that Jack Nicklaus or Ben Hogan had.

This is true in every sport. So these sports become a mind/body discipline. And that is what Yoga is — a lifelong mind/body practice to attain religious illumination. In sport, it’s aimed at attaining particular skills. What is interesting, however, is that these sports spontaneously give rise to what are nothing less than quasi-mystical illuminations.

London: A wonderful example of this is Lee Evans who in 1968 took the world record in the 400-meter dash.

Murphy: That’s right. I was privileged to know Lee and I actually ran with him in some senior track meets. He was hypnotized by his coach Bud Winter, who is perhaps the greatest sprint coach in American history. On the night before he ran 43.86 in Mexico city, he rehearsed every single stride of that race, over and over, under hypnosis. He went through every single stride, over and over. So when he went out to run, his mind was there. And with the mind comes this energetic framework, this aura, if you will.

London: You’ve also used sports as a point of departure for exploring the mysticism of everyday life.

Murphy: Yes, I think these experiences are actually more common than we think, but we are brainwashed by our language. Everyone I know has peculiar gifts that hardly anyone else has. For example, think of your friends. There are certain people, for example, who seem to have this extraordinary ability to just take a glance at someone and know an amazing amount about them. I know a salesman who, just by selling, has learned to scope people out, like a hunter. My son seems to know the content of every movie out there and I don’t think he reads the newspapers all that much. How is it that he knows? And I’ve quizzed him on this many times and he doesn’t know. I could go on.

London: Tell me about your recent work developing a program for systematically developing our human potentialities.

Murphy: People are looking for lifelong, comprehensive practices outside the domain of strict gurus and cults and dogma. I think we have to create new kinds of institutions. In that spirit, George Leonard and I have created a new center outside San Francisco for lifelong integral practice. It will look a little bit like a health club, but on the other hand it will look like a learning center, a seminar center. But you join as a member. Then you can design your own program within this school. I think there has to be more of this kind of “social invention.”

London: I was struck by the fact that your program uses affirmations. How do they work?

Murphy: In our pilot program, we had two eleven-month segments. There were 30 people in each segment practicing a variety of disciplines which we refer to as Integral Transformative Practice — practices for the body, mind, heart and soul. We asked everyone in the programs to make a variety of affirmations and to commit to themselves to practicing to realize them.

One set of affirmations involved change in the realm of the “ordinary” — change that no ordinary doctor would have a problem explaining. You might want to be a half an inch or an inch taller, for example. By good posture and a rolfing massage you can get an inch over time. Most people agree that we slump down as we get older.

We also asked them to make “extraordinary” affirmations. So one lady who was 5′ 1″ made an affirmation that she would grow three inches. We suggested to her that three inches was going too fast. But she said no, she would try that. After three months, indeed she was already consistently three-quarters of an inch taller — but full of aches and pains in her body. At that point, she took our advice to slow down. But she did end the program consistently an inch taller.

Another person who was threatened with a cataract operation made the affirmation that she would have crystal-clear vision. She went into remission and her cataracts disappeared. That is quite a remarkable change.

We also had everybody affirm that they would be vital, balanced, and healthy. In the second year, we wanted to have something measurable because we ran various experiments with the group in the spirit of science. So we wanted everyone to change their lean body mass — to turn a lot of fat into muscle. So many good things happen when you do that, you just get healthier and feel better. So the group made that affirmation. As it turned out, the group averaged a 12.6 reduction of body-fat in relation to total weight. So that was quite a remarkable result because this was a pretty good-shaped group to begin with.

London: In this case, you were having them exercise, I take it — not just doing affirmations?

Murphy: Right. The affirmations were one of the linchpins of the program. So much modern psychology since Freud has been based more on self-awareness and self-acceptance, self-disclosure, opening up — all important for growth — but I feel there has been a neglect (at least in my part of the world, and through Esalen Institute) of what I would call will, or volition, and affirmations are triggering that. I think the reason it has been neglected is that so many of us in the 1960s, when we entered into these practices, were escaping from the strictures of our upbringing, of our schools, churches, families. So anything that smacked of should or will was anathema. (Fritz Pearls, the great gestalt psychologist at Esalen, said he was against all “shouldism.”) So sometimes we tossed the baby out with the bathwater.

It came into modern psychology, certainly in its popular forms, through the 12-step programs, where you make affirmations to improve the quality of your life, to take responsibility, to lick your drinking or gambling problem, your drug addiction, or whatever. So the use of affirmations has been there and has been developed.

I continue to be amazed at the power of affirmations not only to cure our afflictions, but to increase our capacities. In sports, again, people affirm that they are going to break a record, they are going to surpass a time, or whatever. The power of it is amazing.

London: You had a community of people who were all engaged in this program together. It’s often been said that people can do great things together that they can’t do on their own. Did you find that to be true?

Murphy: There is the power of entrainment. You go out for a run, for example, and you may not feel like running, but if you get with a group of peers who are in shape and starting to run, they can carry you along. When you sing in a choir and you’re just off but the choir is going for it and suddenly your voice just gets carried along. Or when you’re with a very high-spirited person and you’re a little down, that energy can really pick you up.

Humans are contagious to one another. In a group, a team, a community like ours, that influence is going back and forth — again, for bad or good. It’s also working through social cues. We mimic one another. We imitate one another. Then there is reinforcement. We reinforce or punish one another.

London: In my own spiritual practice, I’ve certainly found it helpful to have others to who are engaged in it with me.

Murphy: Yes. Boy, does it help to have people to practice with. They asked the Buddha, “What is the secret of enlightenment?” He said, seek out the sangha, the fellowship. Practice with someone.

It’s hard. You are doing this long-term practice for these changes and there are all those days you don’t feel like doing it. There are days when you do and days when you don’t. But if you have a community, it helps to lift you up.

London: There are also some downsides to practicing as part of a group. Sometimes a community of practitioners can become insular, closed-minded, or too dependent on a leader. Have you found that to be a problem?

Murphy: We made an agreement with everyone in these groups that they were ultimately responsible for their program. I believe personal autonomy has got to be respected from the beginning, at the middle, and in the end. Those of us who are presenting the program actually don’t believe very much in the guru model. I think it was appropriate in another age when life was simpler. But today we have all become so complex, and life itself has become so complex, that one guru can’t be our guide in all things. I mean, we can’t expect someone who teaches us meditation to guide us in our financial affairs, or help us complete our income taxes. That is just asking too much. And that is the problem with a lot of cults and gurus.

So we were committed to this principle of autonomy, as well as community. I think the two can be completely compatible. When we create support groups for practice, I do think we need to honor the principle of personal freedom and autonomy. I think that is one of the new things in our age that we are sensitive to more than ever before in world history. It’s been part of the long social evolution of the human race. Democracy is essential, and we need it not just in government but in our long-term practice groups. We need democracy. We need mentorship. We don’t need guruvada.

London: You’re very optimistic about our capacities to grow and evolve. How do you respond to those who point out that the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history and that we’re looking at the flowering of human pathology — exemplified by atom bombs, terrorism, and environmental devastation — not the flowering of human consciousness?

Murphy: I don’t pretend to be a futurist. All I say is, we can improve our lives, the lives of those around us, and the whole wide world by exploring our hidden potentials. We’re learning more and more about them. And they can be applied to social action. I believe we can turn things around.

More:

• Integral Transformative Practice International
• FORA.tv with George Leonard and Michael Murphy
• The Future of the Body by Michael Murphy

As one might expect, much of what’s been published on the subject falls under the banner of management theory. It’s not surprising, perhaps, given that organizations live and die based on how well they navigate the rapids of change. There was also a good deal of research on the fascinating topic of social and cultural change.

But I was puzzled to learn that very little has been written about personal change. How do individuals grow, develop, and renew themselves? Books on psychology, personal development, and even spirituality deal with the subject at some depth, yes. But not that many address the important link between how individuals change and how that in turn affects organizations, communities, and larger social systems.

As we know, large-scale change happens one person at a time. Or does it? I’m not so sure. 

Early in my research I hit on the work of management consultant Margaret Wheatley. In her endlessly thought-provoking 1992 book, Leadership and the New Science, she observed that, consciously or not, organizations tend to model themselves on Isaac Newton’s 17th-century depiction of the universe as a giant machine in which the parts move and pull one another in predictable and immutable ways. The assumptions of mechanistic science still prevail today, she said, despite the fact that quantum physics, systems theory, and the mathematics of chaos have rendered many of its principles obsolete.

A typical example of this is the fact that by and large leaders manage by separating things into parts. They believe that influence occurs as a direct result of force exerted from one person to another. They engage in complex planning for a world they assume to be predictable. And they continually search for better methods of objectively perceiving and measuring the world. But each of these approaches stems from the outdated assumptions of mechanistic science.

According to Wheatley, tomorrow’s leaders need to draw wisdom from the new sciences which offer fresh perspectives on age-old management issues like control, structure, participation, planning, and prediction. For example, quantum physics teaches that the atom is made up not of solid billiard balls, as the old models suggest, but of electrons, photons, and mesons that sometimes act like particles and sometimes like waves. Thus, at the quantum level, absolute prediction and uniformity are impossible. What is possible to ascertain, however, are patterns, or potentialities. In chaos theory, these are called “fractals” — simple mathematical formulas that repeat and repeat on themselves to create infinite diversity.

Similarly, systems theory — an interdisciplinary field aimed at understanding dynamic, living systems — shows that complex structures have the capacity to self-organize. As Wheatley pointed out, the idea that order arises spontaneously, rather than through direction and control, points to different kind of universe than the one described by Newton and his contemporaries. “Not the fragile, fragmented world we attempt to hold together, but a universe rich in processes that support growth and coherence, individuality and community.”

I sat down with Wheatley and explored some of these topics. She told me that she and her fellow management consultants would sometimes confess to one another that they didn’t really know how to effect lasting change. It was still something of a mystery to them — even though they made their living trying to help leaders bring it about in organizations and communities.

Recently, Wheatley has been exploring another concept with rich implications for those of us who care about effecting large-scale change. She calls it “emergence.” Emergence is the process by which “separate, local efforts connect and strengthen their interactions and interdependencies. What emerges as these become stronger is a system of influence, a powerful cultural shift that then greatly influences behaviors and defines accepted practices.”

Wheatley challenges the simplistic notion that change happens one person at a time. The principle of emergence shows that broad changes in an organization or among a large group of people requires that there be networks of influence and communities of practice.

But this idea still side-steps what I take to be the fundamental question at the core of all efforts to create change: Are people willing to change in the first place? Are they prepared to be open to new inputs, insights and understandings? Are they open to being changed in the process of creating change? (Marshall Goldsmith offers his take on this question here.) This is the issue, I believe, that lies at the heart of whether change efforts thrive or wilt. And it’s a topic I will be exploring further in this space in weeks and months to come.

Read more:

• Understanding Change — A review of the literature
• The New Science of Leadership — My interview with Margaret Wheatley
• On emergence — From MargaretWheatley.com
• When People Don’t Want to Change — Marshall Goldsmith at Harvard Business Online