Envisioning Heartspace

If you want to picture what Heartspace looks like, envision a geodesic dome. Notice in this closeup of the Montreal Biosphere that a geodesic dome is made of thousands of interlacing triangles. In Heartspace, each point of contact among the triangles is a sustained connection in your life. All of these connections lace together in order to form your Heartspace. However, instead of holding a hollow space on the interior like a dome, your connections also lace inwards in a profuse and lavish network of connections and intraconnections. This represents the sustained nature of Heartspace, and the reality that each of your connections affects every other to varying degrees. In this way, your personal engagement is like a spider's web, too, where the vibrations shake the inexplicably strong connections you have within and around you.

However, Heartspace is more still, because rather than having finite endings that are clear and identifiable, the sustained connections you maintain within and outside yourself are launched ad infinitum throughout your life. Heartspace literally has no boundaries.

When we interact with another person's Heartspace, it can be useful to envision overlapping connections vis-à-vis ripples in water. Just like ripples that radiate out from the place where a drop of water lands on the surface of a body of water, our sustained connections coarse through our Heartspace and into the lives of others, generally unconsciously, but sometimes consciously, too. This explains the experience of falling in love, or melding deep friendships, or nurturing warm connections with our children.

These images are meant to enliven our visions of Heartspace, what it is, and how it works throughout our lives. If they do not work for you, simply release them from your imagination. Look within yourself and imagine what your Heartspace looks like for you. You might even draw that, or write a poem about it. Reply to this post and let me know what you think and feel about the ways sustained personal engagements look throughout your world.

Charter Schools Destroy Democracy

The story of charter schools in Washington State is intense. It spans several introductions in the Legislature, involves the voting down of the approach by citizens three times, is foisted up by education organizations and politicians bank-rolled by large foundations that are dismantling public schools across the United States, and generally disregards the education and well-being of students beyond their roles as tokens in the struggle.

The Challenge

Yesterday, an editorial was published in the Seattle Times by an editor of Rethinking Schools who is an education faculty at the University of Washington-Bothell. Dr. Wayne Au writes,

Charters underserve English-language learners and students with disabilities; they do not keep accurate track of student data, such as who is on free and reduced lunch; their governing boards regularly lack public accountability; they have also reached levels of racial segregation not seen since before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that legally ended "separate but equal" schooling — prompting the NAACP to issue a statement in 2010 opposing charter schools.

This is a large part of my active discouragement of these places at every turn: Charters are the wolves in sheep's clothing, being pitched by businesspeople in farmer's costumes. They are insidious for many reasons, several that go beyond the professors concerns. In a report from the Institute of Education Sciences of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, a part of the US Department of Education, it was stated that,

On average, charter middle schools that held lotteries were neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving math or reading test scores, attendance, grade promotion, or student conduct within or outside of school. Being admitted to a study charter school did significantly improve both students' and parents' satisfaction with school.

This means that charters are more effective at creating the perception of change in schools, rather than change itself. Knowing that they are not held routinely held accountable the way public schools are, it is no wonder why they consistently look better.

Performance is only part of my concern thought.

There is a reason why foundations are not pouring money into private schools and sending students there by droves. Charters are systematically, routinely designed to siphon money from the public school system by diverting public support and target it towards private interests. The lesson charter school advocates, including foundations, politicians, and lobbyists are promoting is that having public accountability is a failure, and private innovation is the only way to go.

Anyone who cares about democracy and social justice needs to see the truth of charters: They are trojan horses for destroying democratic society. There's a reason why the U.S. was the first nation in the world to consider them seriously, and why only deeply capitalist countries are adopting them.

Charter schools are baaaaad news.

I agree that there is always more room, but I do not agree that charter schools have absolutely anything to do with it. Charter schools are a false choice forced on Americans as "The Only Choice", insofar as they represent an extreme departure from the democratic nature of public schools and an isolatory uplifting of capitalism as an ideal.

The Solution

There are great strides that can be taken to reinvent public schools.

• Actively engage all students as partners throughout the public education system in order to foster authentic, meaningful school reform. Dismantle that old system created for the industrialists of the 19 century. 
• Redesign all learning for the 21st century. 
• Dismantle the meritocracy that hires only teachers from schools that teach the old methods. 
• Empower parents and communities to provide elders and teachers from life experience, new science, oral historians, and those who will share whole, uncensored versions of history. 
• Allow all children to regain their natural curiosity and recover from oppressive, authoritarian institutions. 
• Allow teachers to be creative and help design public schools with parent advisory board approval.

I adapted this list from a friend who suggested all these things can only happen through charters. I'm disinterested in any so-called "innovation" that ultimately detracts from the public nature of public schools, particularly along the lines of private and charter schools. In my experience of working with public schools over the last decade to foster innovative policy and practice, private and charter schools have proven to be ineffective models to hold against the realities public schools face.

We need a concerted effort to refocus our public schools along those lines by inserting public will into public schools. The same public will can eviscerate the influence of corporations on the machinations of public education, particularly on the political and administrative sides. Politicians and public education administrators have succeeded in veiling the high level functions of public schools from the public, and we need to pull back that veil to understand what's happening there- instead of abandoning it, and the individual classrooms that echo what goes on in the upper echelons. That will take a radical approach to democratic ownership and the wholesale engagement of parents and communities, and that is what many charter school advocates are calling for. Public education is capable of providing this, so long as we, including residents and citizens and parents and voters and children and youth, stand for it and tell politicians that the public controls public schools, not corporations or private influence. 


We need a thrust of public-driven innovation in public education, not the further privatization of public institutions of private benefit. That's exactly what charters are, and what they do: benefit few at the expense of many. We need to reinvigorate the role of public education. We need public democracy schools that use democracy to educate about democracy, and not otherwise, which is what a lot of so-called democratic schools do.

A public education promotion campaign should be designed to counter the poor perception the public has about public schools. They have been smeared by mainstream media, politicians, and corporations for decades. They have also been called out repeatedly by parents and students who had horrendous experiences in public schools, and public schools have not responded. It is time to reclaim the positive powerful potential of public schools. It is not merely a "PR campaign" that is needed, either. Labeling truth-telling about public schools as "PR" is fighting cynicism with cynicism. We need a campaign to educate everyone about the fragile balance our democratic society walks, and the essential role public schools play in maintaining that balance.

The solution is not to abandon public schools en masse. It is easy to hear the loud, upset, concerned, and disenfranchised voters wagging their fingers at teachers, shaking their fists at principals, and bawling out their students when they do not get good grades. I do see students continue to leave schools in growing numbers, pushed out for economic, racial, and cultural reasons that should be addressed. I do see middle-class, white, suburban parents taking their children out of public schools more frequently. These situations are not the problems. The problem bears repeating:

Charters are trojan horses for destroying democratic society. 

And nothing less. We need to stop them, now.

Universal Engagement and Heartspace

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live."

—Norman Cousins

There is a space between our sleep and our dreams where the fertile grounds of imagination takes hold, and where our Heartspace is unconsciously nurtured, despite all we may do to neuter it during the day. This is where our Heartspace is unconsciously nurtured, despite all the ways it may be neutered during the day. All the things we do that may thwart our true selves, including lies, cheating and stealing, hurts and aches, abuses and all of these pains we suffer, these things get washed away in our dreams.

Norman Cousins rightfully takes the pressure off dying, because there should be none. We know that life has its cycles. We understand we are like the egg becoming a caterpillar, becoming a chrysalis, blooming into a butterfly that lays eggs, and then dies. That is life. Death is not the greatest loss in life.

We should not mourn what dies inside us while we live, either. Heartspace is the interior cache where each of us can reclaim everything that is truly ours. Joys, innocence, memories, experiences… each of these is meant for us to have the experience we do with it. If we remember, maintain, sustain, and contain life in all its myriad ways, then that is exactly how we are supposed to experience it. If we loosen and lose, disappear, distract, contract, or retract, that is okay, too. The important thing to know is that our life, the one we live every single day, belongs to us whether or not claim it, own it, or name it. The engine of personal engagement gives us self-ownership over everything we experience, and allows us to access it whenever we want.

What dies inside us while we live is a tender thing because we face it every day. We may watch our children and see child selves playing through them. We can see the schools and playgrounds brimming with excited action and we want to be there. We can look at young lovers, watch grown parents, see the squinting eyes of the elderly, and all the while imagine, dream, remember, yearn, or desire what they are experiencing. Rarely do we simply see what is happening around us without judging it in some way. This is what led a journalist like Counsins to his conclusion about things dying inside of us. It is true that feelings, emotions, states of being, people, places, memories, knowledge, ideas, all of these things do transition and move beyond us. But it is not true to believe these experiences are either the "greatest loss" or that they are actually dead.

Unlike butterflies, the things that go on inside us have no ending in their life cycles. As human beings, there is an infinity we access through our Heartspace. Unconsciously or consciously, our minds, hearts, actions, and souls act out this infinite access through our personal engagements and our social engagements. This is the definition of universal engagement.

Universal engagement is the sustained connection we all share within or outside ourselves with the rest of everything. Universal engagements are tangible: The laws of gravity and cause and effect are two tangible examples of sustained connections we share with the rest of everything. They are intangible, too, and that is what I mention our dreams.

The fertile grounds of our sleep are occupied by a deep interaction between our Heartspace and our hands, exposing to our minds the infrequency of death and the absolute necessity of universal engagement. Go there tonight, sleep, and may your dreams be realized. It was once declared, "In dreams begin responsibility." Our Heartspace demands that we take change, be who we are, and go forth into the day, alive. No loss.