Gestión del talento humano

By nature, education – learning – is a life long process. This is not only true for human beings, but of all life; for living beings are by nature adaptive – creative – to changing circumstances. For people to live well, to have deeply meaningful lives, they need to learn continually, and as Native people recognized, those who do that well over time obtain wisdom.

Continual learning beyond formal education is especially important for participatory politics and economics. As situations change and new knowledge becomes known, people need not only additional information – or old information that was not previously known to them – but understanding in order to live well, and adapt to events, in all aspects of their lives. This is especially the case for decision making. Thus ongoing public education is essential for well working participatory democracy. A good deal of learning will take place directly from the discussion and experience which is at the heart of participatory processes. Moreover, the participatory person, educated to think deeply and question will insist upon self-education, and co- education through dialoguing with others. But there is also a need for conscious civic education by government, non-governmental organizations, the media, and fellow citizens. This needs to be in the form of thoughtful and thought provoking presentation – often through dialoguing or otherwise presenting the various aspects and views of issues – and not as propaganda. In a participatory society with participatory citizens, however, pure propaganda is usually not effective, for people will question it, turning initial assertion into discussion. This is not to say that some exhortation is not needed, on moral, health, or safety issues, such as campaigns to discourage smoking, or not to drive while drinking. American Indian elders certainly certainly exhorted their fellow tribespersons to act properly, But, in tribal society, and in any participatory society, exhortation is engaged in not on the basis of hierarchical authority, but among equally valued fellow citizens. It is normally undertaken after long discussion, on a basis of reasonable consensus, and if it is not, it is, and ought to be, open to question.

An interesting event in the way of civic education leading to more participation was occurring in the United States in the summer of 2015.47 As a result of the popularity of a growing body of scientific study indicating that experience and not objects bring about the most happiness, many people, especially those in their twenties and thirties, were buying things less, and spending more on experiences, such as out of town vacations, gym memberships and meals with friends.

As of March 2018, some significant movement toward more holistic and participatory education was in progress in the United States and elsewhere. While the instructive developments of many years at the East Harlem Public School are no longer continuing, the Putney School has become a major player in a revitalized progressive education movement, and has inspired the establishment of a number of private schools and at least one major public school program.48 Meanwhile, IDEA: Institute for Democratic Education in America is engaged in a number of education reform projects across the U.S., while Democracy in Education was publishing its Volume 27, with readers around the world, in fall 2017.49 At a winter 2018 meeting, two education faculty members from The University of South Carolina Upstate, shared with author Stephen Sachs that numerous public schools, disenchanted with what has been required by recent federal programs, have begun to adopt aspects of Dewey's progressive education.50 They have done so because they, and others, have found these approaches work, although in a great many instances they are unaware of their origins in John Dewy and other progressives, or of their older American Indian roots.

What makes progressive and other indigenous oriented education particularly relevant is that a great deal of recent and current research indicates that it is the best way to undertake learning. Escuela Nueva, which has been spreading rapidly across Latin America and Africa, was founded

Overall, good holistic democratic education in institutions of learning and beyond is essential for well working participatory society, and for living well. Conversely, participatory society and culture provide and encourage a high level of holistic participatory education.

End Notes

1. Ron Miller, What Are Schools For?: Holistic Education in American Culture, 3rd edition (Brandon, VT: Holistic Education Press, 1997). pp. 96, 178-180,

2. This is the general thrust of Miller, What Are Schools For?, but several sections focus on this concern more particularly, including pp. 195-209.

3. LaDonna Harris, Mentor and Editor; Stephen M. Sachs and Barbara Morris, General Authors; Deborah Esquibel Hunt, Gregory A. Cajete. Bejamin Broome, Phyllis M. Gagnier, and Jonodev Chaudhuri, Contributing Editors, Recreating the Circle: The Renewal of American Indian Self- Determination (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), Ch. 2 and 5, Section 2; Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 1991), and The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Random House, 2005).

4. Horace M. Kallen, The Education of Free Men (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949), p 129, as quoted in Miller, What Are Schools For?, p. 145.

5. Miller, What Are Schools For?, p. 145, quoting Peter F. Carbone, The Social and Educational Thought of Harold Rugg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977).

6. On the No Child Left Behind Act see, for example: “No Child Left Behind: Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA),” U.S. Department of Education,

http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml, accessed October 11, 2015; Deborah Meier, George

Wood, Eds., Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); “American Schools in Crisis? Debating No Child Left Behind,” NOW, October 17, 2003, http://www.pbs.org/now/society/nclb.html; Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000); Elizabeth A. Harris, "20% of New York State Students Opted Out of Standardized Tests This Year," The New York Times, August 12, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/nyregion/new-york-state-students-standardized-

tests.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0; and Harris, Sachs and Morris, Recreating the Circle, pp. 62,

144, 328, 376, and 402 n131. On budget cuts in education, for example, see: U.S. Department of

Education Budget History, www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/history/index.html, with detailed tables showing the budget history of the U.S. Department of Education from FY 1980 to the FY 2016, accessed October 11, 2015; Rebecca Klein, “Education Budget Cuts: This Is What

A School Funding Crisis Sounds Like,” HuffingtonPost.com, April 18,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/education-budget-cuts/; Nicholas Johnson, Phil Oliff and

Erica Williams, “An Update on State Budget Cuts: At Least 46 States Have Imposed Cuts That

9, 2011, http://www.cbpp.org/research/an-update-on-state-budget-cuts; and Jeanne Sahadi, “Spending cuts to education and nutrition will hurt kids,” CNN Money, September 9, 2014,

http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/19/news/economy/federal-spending-on-children/index.html. On

charter schools and the movement to privatize public education, for example, see: “Charter School Movement Turns 20, Amid Criticism And Success Stories,” Huffington Post, July 12, 2012,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/07/public-charter-school-mov_n_1865151.html;

“History of the Charter School Movement,” DC Watch, March 2000,

http://www.dcwatch.com/lwvdc/lwv0003c.htm; and Claudio Sanchez, “From A Single Charter

School, A Movement Grows,” August 31, 2014,

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/02/160409742/from-a-single-charter-school-a-movement-grows.

On the issue of too much stress in the current approach to education, Kyle Spencer, “New Jersey School District Eases Pressure on Students, Baring an Ethnic Divide,” The New York Times, December 25, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/nyregion/reforms-to-ease-students- stress-divide-a-new-jersey-school-district.html?ref=todayspaper, reported, “This fall, David Aderhold, the superintendent of a high-achieving school district near Princeton, N.J., sent parents an alarming 16-page letter.

The school district, he said, was facing a crisis. Its students were overburdened and stressed out, juggling too much work and too many demands.

In the previous school year, 120 middle and high school students were recommended for mental health assessments; 40 were hospitalized. And on a survey administered by the district, students wrote things like, ‘I hate going to school,’ and ‘Coming out of 12 years in this district, I have learned one thing: that a grade, a percentage or even a point is to be valued over anything else.’

With his letter, Dr. Aderhold inserted West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District into a national discussion about the intense focus on achievement at elite schools, and whether it has gone too far.

At follow-up meetings, he urged parents to join him in advocating a holistic, ‘whole child’ approach to schooling that respects ‘social-emotional development’ and ‘deep and meaningful learning’ over academics alone. The alternative, he suggested, was to face the prospect of becoming another Palo Alto, Calif., where outsize stress on teenage students is believed to have contributed to two clusters of suicides in the last six years.”

7. Harris, Sachs and Morris, Recreating the Circle, Ch. 1, Section 2 and Ch. 5, Section 2; in Daniel R. Wildcat. “Indigenizing Education: Playing to Our Strengths,” in Vine Deloria, Jr,, and Daniel Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2001), pp. 12-19. Stephen M. Sachs, “Remembering the Traditional Meaning and Role of Kinship In American Indian Societies, To Overcome Problems of Favoritism In Contemporary Tribal Government,” Proceedings of the 2011 Western Social Science Association Meeting, American Indian Studies Section, in Indigenous Policy, Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall 2011; and Stephen M. Sachs, "Honoring the Circle: The Impact of American Indian Tradition on Western Political Thought and

8. The greater complexity and inclusiveness of Indian thinking and approaches to problems is shown in the discussion of the application of the Indigenous Leadership Interactive System (ILIS) in Harris, Sachs and Morris, Recreating the Circle, Ch. 4, Part 1, with direct comments about the greater complexity on pp. 247 and 248, and 274 n50 and n51.

9. On Apache ways of upbringing and rites of passage, including the Women's Puberty Rite, see James L. Haley, Apaches: A History and Cultural Portrait (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), pp. 130-141; and Michael Melody, The Apache (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989), Ch. 3.

10. Reflecting the change away from community concern for the behavior of its children, in the 1970s and 1980s, Stephen Sachs asked several older people in different U.S. cities he visited how life had changed since they were young. Consistently, a central part of the answer was that when they were young, if they did something wrong, a neighbor would often see it and tell their parents, who would confront them, and often punish them about it. But the elders said this did not happen regularly anymore.

11. From the work of Jean Piaget, for example see, The child's conception of physical causality (London: Kegan Paul, 1930); To understand is to invent: The future of education (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973; Six psychological studies (New York: Random House, 1967); Science of education and the psychology of the child (New York: Orion Press, 1970); Intellectual evolution from adolescence to adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977); and The Equilibration of Cognitive Structures: The Central Problem of Intellectual Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). On Erick Erikson's developing his theory of stages of human child development, completed in the 1950s, from observing Oglala Lakota and Yurok child rearing practices, see: Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield, Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations (New York: Facts on File Library of American History, 2001), p. 100-101; and Robert Coles, Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1970).

12. Scott L. Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,2002).

13. John Dewey, Schools for Tomorrow (Boston: Heath, 1906) p. 199.

14. Author Stephen Sachs was a student at Putney from 1953-56, and his experience there is the core of the discussion of Putney. Sachs has remained interested in the school, and undertook research in 1991-92 for an article, "The Putney School: John Dewey is Alive and Well in Southern Vermont," Democracy and Education, Spring 1992. The discussion of Putney here us an update of that article with additional research in fall 2015 and spring 2016. Many thanks are due to Alison McRae (a member of the Putney School Board of Trustees) at the Putney Alumni office for updated information as of January, 1992. The Putney School website contains a great deal of information about the school, and was one of the research sources: http://www.putneyschool.org. Thus this discussion of Putney focuses on three periods, 1953-56, 1991-92, and 2014-16. For more details, contact the Putney School, 418 Houghton Brook Road, Putney, VT 05346-8675, (802) 387- 5566.

Looking beyond the 2014-16 period, the Putney Post, Spring 2016, and discussions by author Stephen Sachs with Putney staff in June 2016, reflected the school's continuing innovativeness in seeking to improve its operation and better achieve its goals. As Don Cuerdon, "Moving from 'Chair Time' to Competency in Defining Putney Graduates," Putney Post, Spring 2016, noted, since early in public education in the U.S., under the Carnegie Unit System, requirements for graduation had been established according to the time spent on certain topics or activities, leaving competencies developed by students as the variable. Putney was now seeking to develop a viable policy to "standardize what kids learn, and let time be the variable:" (p. 16) to set minimum graduation requirements based on competencies actually attained, rather than on time spent engaged on a topic, with testing on occasion, that might not accurately assess competency. The new academic program, planned to be launched in 2017, would increase student ownership of their academic work, providing greater flexibility to meet the divergent needs of different students.

15. In 1991-92, 42% percent, and in 2015, 43%, of the students received at least some scholarship assistance including a reduction in fees for faculty children. Diversity is not as great as the school would wish, largely for two reasons: first, the limited size of the school's endowment and other sources of financial aid money to cover the tuition, which in 2015 covered about 70% of the cost of a Putney education. At that time, full tuition was $52,900 a year for boarding students and $32,800 for day students. Second, the high academic standards have made it difficult for some potentially interested students from minority backgrounds and disadvantaged education to be able to qualify academically. Thus the Putney student body, compared to the United States as a whole, is over representative of higher income and better education backgrounds. That, plus its ability to have small classes and a low student to faculty ratio, contributes to its success. However, the success of John Dewey's democratic education in Gary Public schools in the early Twentieth Century attests to the viability of applying the principles that Putney follows in less advantaged settings. Further evidence of this is given in Miller, What Are Schools For?.

16. Quoted in Jan Emlen, "Pulling Civilization Up: A Sampling of Putney's World Caretakers," Putney Post, Summer, 1991, p. 5.

17. Head of the Putney School, Emily Jones, "Place/Architecture/Education," Putney Post, No. 133, fall 2016. Jones discusses that what is put on the land becomes a part of it, effecting the land and everything on and in it, including the people.

The Cabin Program, and the cabins, are mentioned on the Putney web site. Details were provided by Putney Development Associate Brian Cohen, in an E-mail response, November 13, 2017, to a question about the program from Stephen Sachs.

18, Miller, What Are Schools For?, in discussing Dewey and some other educators in Ch. 6, comments that to be fully holistic and developmental of the student, more needs to be done in the spiritual aspect, which Dewey and these others do not address directly in their educational theory.

19. The discussion of East Harlem public schools is based on information and analysis in David Osborne andTed Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is

Rethinking America (Random House, 1995), Ch. 6. That proper participatory management increases the performance of organizations by every measure, in comparison with hierarchically managed organizations, is discussed in Reinventing Government, especially in Chapter 9.

20. Osborne and Gabler, Reinventing Government, p. 6.

21. On the importance of parent participation and support for their children learning successfully at school see, Research Spotlight on Parental Involvement in Education: NEA Reviews of the Research on Best Practices in Education, http://www.nea.org/tools/17360.htm, accessed November 27, 2015; Parental Involvement Improves Student Achievement: When Parents Are Involved In Their Children’s Education At Home, They Do Better In School. And When Parents Are Involved In School, Children Go Farther In School—And The Schools They Go To Are Better, OEA: Ohio Education Association, http://www.ohea.org/parental-involvement, accessed November 27, 2015; and “Parental Involvement Strongly Impacts Student Achievement,” Science Daily, May 28, 2008, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080527123852.htm.

22, Osborne and Gabler, Reinventing Government, p. 271.

23. Ibid., Ch. 4, with direct reference to East Harlem schools on p. 113.

24. Miller, What Are Schools For? discusses a number of educational movements from abroad that have been applied in the United States.

25. See, David L Kirp. "Make School a Democracy," The New York Times, February 28, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sunday/make-school-a-

democracy.html?ref=todayspaper; and Fundacion Escuela Nueva: Volvamos a la Gente, http://www.escuelanueva.org/portal/en/escuela-nueva-model.html, accessed 10/18/15. the web site includes links to a number of evaluations, some of them comparative, of Escuela Nueva schools.

26. American Institutes for Research, Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes, September 24, 2014, http://www.air.org/project/study-deeper-learning-opportunities-and- outcomes.

27. "Theory of Change," Fundacion Escuela Nueva: Volvamos a la Gente, http://www.escuelanueva.org/portal/en/escuela-nueva-model.html.

28, Ibid.

http://www.escuelanueva.org/portal/en/escuela-nueva-model.html. 30. Kirp. "Make School a Democracy."

31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid.

34. Stephen Sachs, Joseph Farah and Richard Frisbie, "Large Systems Non Violent Change in U.S. Public Schools: The View from Indianapolis," Organization Development Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter 1994. Stephen Sachs was a participant in the process, and witnessed some of the related events during and after this article was written that are included here in the discussion of attempted change at IPS. The Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee web site is at: http://indygipc.org. 35. For example, see John Simmons and William Mares, Working Together (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1983); and Dave Francis and Don Young, Improving Work Groups: A Practical Manuel for Team Building (San Diego: University Associates, Inc. 1979).

36. For example, see Gretchen Reynolds, “Brawn and Brains,” The New York Times, November 18, 2015 5:40 am, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/brawn-and-

brains/?ref=todayspaper&_r=0.

37. The Hobart Shakespeareans, produced by, and available from PBS: