After March 4: Students and Faculty for Free Education in California   

The March 4 mobilization of tens of thousands of students and faculty in California was an important and valuable step. Here we present a strategy for how the movement can win in California.

Strategy for Students and Faculty After March 4 Demonstrations for California Education 

            By Rabbi Michael Lerner, chair, the Network of Spiritual Progressives  RabbilLerner@Tikkun.org

 

The mobilization March 4 was powerful and important.  Now the question is: how to transform that energy into political power.

 

 Corporate America wants to train us to be an obedient and work-by-the-rules workforce for them, and education means training to fit into their slots. They see no value in developing human beings who can use their own intelligence or develop their own values. And they’ve convinced many Californians that they’d be better off with tax cuts than with thinking, questioning students.

            NSP’s alternative: to challenge corporate control of education at every level. We have  developed an Environmental and Ethical Responsibility, a Global Marshall Plan, and much else—and we are inviting students and faculty and supporters of genuine education to work with us to challenge corporate power over education.  

 

 

 

Most Californians are torn between two conflicting feelings on this question:

1.     Their sense that education should be funded

2.     Their feeling that their taxes are too high and that “the government” is not really serving their interests. In addition, they don’t remember their own education with fond memories and they don’t really like the fact that students seem contemptuous of “ordinary people” and they therefore identify students and faculty with the “liberal elites” whom they perceive as having a put-down attitude toward everyone else.

 

A movement that could actually win has to build on point one, but can only succeed if it also addresses point two in a successful way.

 

On point one there are two strategies:

A.     The Lakoff Amendment that would overturn the previous California Constitutional Amendment that required a 2/3 vote of the Legislature for a budget to pass. The Lakoff Amendment says it should only require a majority of the Legislature to pass the budget. This proposal is important and deserves support. But it has two inherent weaknesses: it is technocratic, about a change in procedure, but not substantial, a change in ideas about what deserves to be funded. So it doesn’t immediately convey the notion that education deserves to be funded; and it doesn’t address the issues about why people feel government is not serving their interests.

B.     An Amendment needs to be crafted which would substantively require the Legislature to fund education and social services for the needy at a certain percentage of the annual budget, but it would have to also include the requirement that education not be geared primarily toward serving the interests of corporations, which should do their own training of the skills they need, but rather toward the goal of creating human beings who are kind, generous, caring for others, grateful and filled with awe at the grandeur of the universe, oriented toward ethical behavior and environmental sustainability, and committed to building a world of non-violence, social justice, peace, tolerance, democracy, respect for others with whose politics we disagree, respect for science and rational discourse but also for spiritual consciousness and emotional intelligence,  and recognition that our own well being as Americans depends on the well being of everyone on the planet and on the well-being of the planet itself.   By stating a substantive vision of what education should be about, we are far more likely to overcome the resistance to the higher taxes needed to pay for a school system that is free for every Californian from kindergarten through 4 years of college.

 

On point two, the movement for adequate support for education in California must be viewed as understanding and sympathetic to the resistance that people feel at paying higher taxes for a government that they distrust. Here are some ways that can happen:

1.     Acknowledge that taxes paid nationally for military interventions around the world, or that give subsidies to the large corporations and agri-business, or paid in California to pay for endlessly expanding prisons are in fact bad investments. Acknowledge that people are right to feel that they often find themselves being treated disrespectfully by federal and state employees—and that from now on, government employees should be evaluated in part on the degree to which they convey genuine caring for the people they are serving (and should be given enough time to do that). Acknowledge that a school system that seeks only to train students to have “skills” but does not train them to be caring or generous or to know how to communicate in a respectful and non-violent way or that fails to plant in them ethical values is really not giving an education but merely a training for a life of subordination to the rich and powerful.

2.     Include in all literature and talk about this movement a commitment to having students develop a “service to the people” mentality in which they are willing to acknowledge a responsibility to the citizens of the state of California who (if our movement succeeds) will fund free education through college—and that that responsibility will be manifested both in an attitude of gratitude and in behavior that includes spending at least a year after college in service to the needs of the people of the State of California.

3.     Show that this movement is not only a self-interest movement by linking it directly to the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ struggle for:

a.     A campaign for a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan to once and for all end global and domestic poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and inadequate health care and to repair the global environment  www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php/gmp_one

b.     A Constitutional Amendment to the US Constitution that affirms that corporations are not persons and cannot spend without limit on elections www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php/20100216121716334

c.      Medicare for Everyone (health care reform based on a single payer model)

d. * Educational Reform: Teach students a New Bottom Line: that what really counts most in life is to enhance our own and each other’s capacities to be loving, kind, generous, caring for each other, environmental and ethical responsibility, and awe and wonder at the universe. Judge schools successful as much by how well they do at turning out students who live by these values as how well they do at math. Use this New Bottom Line as the criterion for judging productivity & efficiency in corporations and in government and in all your policy deliberations.

 

There will be people in the movement who think the issues should be framed in the narrowest possible way. But this is a losing strategy. Until this movement deals with the underlying concerns of Californians and presents a very different approach, it will not get the support it needs to win free education for all Californians.

 

To get this strategy adopted, you will have to work with others in your movement. So we are urging you to join a Students, Faculty and Support for Free Education group of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. First step: join the Network itself at www.spiritualprogressives.org.  Second step: send RabbiLerner@tikkun.org a note saying you wish to be part of this group to work within the movement to put forward the ideas described here—and he will put you in touch with others who share the same perspective so that you can work together.