Appreciating Public Service

Public school teachers, snow plow removal workers, legislators, government administrative staff... All y'all got my respect, simply because they work for the public. Every single person who works for the government in any capacity is due some amount of respect just because they work for the public.

I learned the reality of public service as a public servant. After working for a few city governments in the 1990s, in 2000 I started working for Washington stare government at their education agency. After spending a few years there I went to work for myself. I worked for the state department of health from 2008 to 2010.

In the span of realities facing democratic society, there are a lot of opportunities for individuals to contribute to the health and well-being of democracy. We're all forced to attend public schools by compulsory law, ostensibly for the well-being of society. We pay taxes for the good of society. Citizens vote, politicians run for office, and volunteers serve throughout our communities. Serving democracy is the highest calling any resident in our democratic society.

Government workers serve society by nature of their positions. They routinely receive less pay, and situationally face higher workloads than their private sector counterparts. Even if they don't, government workers do something greater than any private workers: they represent democracy. They are accountable for the laws, policies, rules, and regulations voted in, appointed by, or otherwise creates by the government officials who serve to create them at the behest of the constituents they represent. This is democracy in action.

Teachers in public schools, and by default public schools themselves, represent democracy in action, too. They teach the residents who occupy democracy everyday. As they succeed in their jobs, our democracy succeeds. As they fail, democracy fails. The work teachers do is of the highest necessity of anyone in society. While some people fail at that job, that's no reason to dismiss the entirety of the profession.

Appreciating public service is something in which each resident of democratic society shares a responsibility.

Student Voice and Student Engagement as Trojan Horses

I have a number of concerns about how I am seeing "student voice" and "student engagement" used in K-12 schools, education administration, and other settings that should benefit students to share their voices. One of the is the Trojan Horse Strategy. I call it this because in this approach educators and advocates give students a carrot by listening to their voices, when those same adults blatantly use student voice and student engagement to forward their political agendas without concern for what students are genuinely seeking.

The scariest part of the Trojan Horse is the growing pervasiveness to this approach. Too many schools, governments, and organizations are manipulating student voice to fit into their adult-driven, anti-authentic approaches to promoting particular education reform agendas.

Trojan Horse Parasites


By using the phrases "student voice" and "student engagement", educators, leaders, and advocates are implying their interest in listening to the unfettered opinions, ideas, experiences, and wisdom of students. However, their approach is similar to that of many companies that market to young people: Listening for profit. That's what many educators, leaders, and advocates hope to receive from student voice and student engagement programs: Profit. By continually uplifting the education reform agendas of adults and couching them in "student voice" and "student engagement", many people literally maintain or develop funding for their schools, or their versions of school reform. They continue to maintain or develop funding opportunities for their schools by using "student voice" and "student engagement". If that sounds greedy and parasitic, that's because it is.

Trojan Horse Authority


Most "student voice" and "student engagement" programs use anti-transparent responses to young people. This merely perpetuates the modus operandi of schools, which is to do to and for students, rather than to work with students. I conceptualized Meaningful Student Involvement precisely for the purpose of distinguishing this difference. Meaningful Student Involvement is contingent on student-adult partnerships throughout the education system. The approach advocated for by the vast majority of "student voice" and "student engagement" programs is adult-dictated, adult-agenda oriented, and ultimately will only benefit adults. These "student voice" and "student engagement" programs actually reinforce adult authority, which is antithetical to Meaningful Student Involvement.

Trojan Horse Vacuum

Ultimately, the approach of using "student voice" and "student engagement" to reinforce adults' preconceptions is the same for students as yelling into an empty well. Students speak into a vacuum where they don't know the outcomes of their contributions to educators, leaders, and advocates, and there is little or no accountability. Adults listen only when "student voice" and "student engagement" are needed, and engage students only when adults see it as necessary. Otherwise, there is little or no substantive student presence. The goal of all student engagement activities anywhere in schools should be to build the capacity of students to cause change within the education systems and communities to which they belong. Many "student voice" and "student engagement" programs actually negate students' abilities to cause that change by capturing "student voice" and "student engagement" and putting it into the hands of adults. This disengages, taking away the little authority that authentic "student voice" and "student engagement" should have. It alienates students from the process of whole school reform, and ultimately serves to extinguish any level of interest students may have in the first place.

These three approaches to "student voice" and "student engagement" have brought our schools to where they are now. By manipulating, tokenizing, and exploiting individual students' perspectives on any given topic in education, entire generations of young people have been disengaged from school reform.

The point of Meaningful Student Involvement is to re-engage students in their health of their schools and the education system.

As they stand today, the vast majority of "student voice" and "student engagement" programs only serve to help students learn about their lack of power, and reinforces the belief that the roles of young people throughout society are determined for them, and they simply need to accept what is coming down the line.

This is not what I am about, and that is what is wrong with many "student voice" and "student engagement" programs today.

Protect Our Personal Engagements?

“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is a thought out there that things cared for must be cherished, and in cherishing them we must protect them. However, protecting our engagements throughout life is simply not an option.

Engaging with our children, our family, our friends, and our loved ones is special and important. We are not able to protect them though. Engaging within ourselves by taking time alone, listening to our inner voice while we create and ingest and grow and absorb, this cannot be protected. All of these sustained connections are made for stormy weather, times when it's inconvenient or challenging to make time for them. They are built to last through changes of heart, errant behavior, and transformations of the mind.

If our engagements are not able to weather those movements, that does not mean they are not from our Heartspace. That does not mean they are not more or less real. It simply means that life changes. Change is change, and we cannot and should not protect our engagements from it.

This is a particularly important lesson to teach children, and to remind adults that they learned it in childhood. It reinforces the importance of resilience, which is the ability to bounce back from adversity. Resolving not to protect our engagements particularly allows us to embrace the learning possibilities in challenging situations as we let situations wash over us, and truth reveal itself. Shakespeare alluded to this when he wrote in As You Like It, "Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head."

Life is a constant progression of opportunity, disguised as challenge or suffering. We are meant to live enlivened lives that are filled with the progressions and regressions of our souls and minds, all the while relying on the constancy of Heartspace. That constancy has all the hallmarks of the best relationships and experiences we have ever had, including transformation and change, struggle and growth. At the core of our Heartspace is the simple reality that we are who we are, it is what it is, and it works the way it works. Our human beingness grants us the widest possible leeway we need to experience our lives however we want or need to.

Because, as Krishnamurti wrote, "...for all that is life."