Before we dive in five of the most intriguing and thought-provoking talks on the past, present and future of Servant Leadership, if you are not well-acquainted with this concept, just watch the video below:
Now that you have covered the basics, let’s move on to listen to three people that have been practicing Servant Leadership, in one capacity or another, and have a lot of wisdom to share:
How Great Leaders Serve Others: David Marquet at TEDxScottAFB
David Marquet summarizes his career so far on his LinkedIn profile like this: “Bestselling Author, International Top Ranked Keynoter, saving companies $$millions by building leaders at every level.”
So it’s fair to say that a talk by him on what happens when you give people control and how you can coach them into using it in a constructive way is a definite must-see.
Servant Leadership: How a jar can change the way you lead and serve — Ali Fett
Ali Fett, whose motto is “who you are is good enough; don’t ever stop creating better versions of yourself. It feels great to grow” shares how leaders and coaches can serve others and show them the path towards becoming the best version of themselves.
Ken Blanchard — Servant Leadership
American author Ken Blanchard has a mission: he wants to turn every leader into a servant leader! In this talk he discusses servant leadership and draws attention to the self-centered leader. When a leader believes that leadership is all about them, where you they want to go and what they want to achieve, then their leadership, by default will be more self-focused.
On the other hand, if your leadership revolves around meeting the needs of the organisation and the people working for it, you will make different choices that will reveal a more “others-focused” approach.
Harvard is now officially a school for stupid, rich people.
Successful businessman Balaji Srinivasan said this recently. It took me by surprise. The comment came after Harvard University announced that in 2026 no SAT or ACT requirements are needed.
Whether or not you believe in higher education or traditional schools is irrelevant. The point is that education is transforming out of necessity.
Another issue is that teachers get paid poorly. Their role in society isn’t valued highly enough.
That’s why many of them are going online to find other ways to teach and get paid to do it. My US friend on Twitter left his job at a public school to teach online. He now makes more than $20,000 a month teaching online courses.
An education transformation is inevitable.
Here’s what isn’t normally taught in schools (and should be).
The way to make money and hold onto it
School gave me zero financial education. The basics of investing are a survival skill, thanks to record-high inflation. Most adults still don’t understand the second tax of inflation.
Even worse, most adults still don’t understand how money gets created out of nowhere and enters the economy.
School did something bad to me. Schools in Australia up until recently allowed banks into classrooms to sell products to kids. They gave them bank accounts called “dollar mites.”
The schools got a flat fee plus a kickback commission as a sweetener. Many of the kids held onto these accounts for life because, despite what you might think, many people don’t change banks due to the friction involved.
The government finally stepped in to stop the selling of bad money advice to children. It still happens in many parts of the world. Once you have a six-month emergency fund, a savings account is the worst financial product in the world that pays you 0%.
Schools need real financial education, not bank-sponsored education.
A career that involves multiple professions
At the end of high school the career counselor said “you must pick one career.” She tried to force me to study a trade like plumbing. Unclogging poo in toilets made me vomit in my mouth, just a little.
I couldn’t decide on a career so I left the school and went to another one. Didn’t fix the problem but worth a try.
The choose a job and do-it-for-life days are over.
School kids get taught to do one thing for work when the reality is they will do multiple things to earn a living over their lifetimes. As the rapid rise of technology continues, so too will the yearly evolution of the work skills we need.
Schools need to normalize the multi-career path.
How to avoid being a victim
School doesn’t teach the downsides of the victimhood mentality that’s infected so many parts of the world.
We have too many victims. We have too many people begging for sympathy cards in return for a free ride.
Real life isn’t fair.
None of us gets a clear run of fair opportunities to step into. You make life fair by not giving up. By pushing through the oppressors, not begging them to step down or waiting for them to get voted out of power.
When you get slapped down by life, become the hero of your story. Own it. See it for what it is: a huge advantage, plus free motivation.
Basic social media skills
Social media isn’t just about pretty pictures of exotic locations or 15-second TikTok videos anymore. Social media is communication. Without proper online communication skills, you get left behind.
A class in social media would teach how to:
Send DMs
Leave proper comments
Post content
Tell stories
Write for an online age
Edit videos
Be nice to strangers (a lesson in anti-trollship)
The ability to hold two opposing ideas in our heads
“I’m right and you’re wrong.”
Wars stem from this fatal skill we learn at school. Deep thinkers that change the world can hold two opposing views in their head at the same time.
They can believe that making money online is bad because it can increase credit card fraud, while simultaneously believing that an online business can help a person buy their time back and work from anywhere they choose.
School should teach us to stop trying to be right — and to learn to make people think.
Overcoming fear
The subject of psychology is a class you can choose to take at most schools. It shouldn’t be a choice.
When you understand human psychology you understand the world better and how it works. Fear is a crucial lesson we can learn from by studying psychology. School accidentally pushes us towards the path of comfort when all the intellectual growth is found when we get uncomfortable.
Once you know what your fears are you can understand at a deep level what will likely hold you back for the rest of your life.
You can work on your fears. You can master them. You can make your fears your slave rather than the other way round.
I can’t believe school doesn’t force us to study fear.
How to unf*ck the environment
Tim Ferris made a comment recently on his podcast that the main thing that keeps him awake at night is climate change.
It’s the biggest problem of the 21st century. Governments globally are still snoozing on it. Yet the signs of the Earth getting warmer are now undeniable. We all feel them. We all experience the wild changes in weather that never used to exist.
School doesn’t go deep on climate change. You’d be seen as a weirdo if you dared bring up the fact that farming animals for food is one of the biggest causes of climate change on Earth.
Until we learn more about climate change, the urgency to fix it won’t be there. Every year that goes by, the damage becomes more irreversible. You and I will probably be fine. But what about future generations?
Climate change education must start in schools.
The advantages of failure and rejection
Schools are full of tests. Get a good grade? Good boy? Fail on a test? Bad boy.
Life couldn’t be more different. Life tests you. With business, for example, you’re supposed to fail multiple times. That’s how you learn what *not* to do.
Rejection is seen as bad too. Get rejected from your favorite prestigious university like Harvard? You should get upset. You should feel bad. Wrong. Getting rejected makes you want a goal MORE.
Rejection increases motivation.
Get rejected from every job you apply for, like I did when I got fired, and you’ll become the most direct, succinct, assertive, beautiful human.
Rejection isn’t failure. Rejection is redirection to a better opportunity.
How to have more than one income
You know, so we don’t lose our job and end up on the street.
One income equals enormous risk, yet this is the default path taught in schools. If you have one income then all it takes is a predictable recession to blow you over and force you into survival mode aka desperation.
Schools should teach us how to monetize the skills we gain more than once.
How to break the rules, not follow them
You do good on a test at school and you’re supposed to get all the rewards.
Those who are good at tests know how to follow the rules. But those who know how to legally break the rules get all the rewards in real life.
Following the rules stalls your life. Breaking the perceived rules turns on the turbocharger. It helps you see solutions others can’t. You find second and third doors the majority of people miss.
If there’s one necessary skill to learn in life, it’s that there are no rules. You make up the freaking rules as you go along. School doesn’t teach you that.
Parents hoped this school year might be ‘normal.’ It hasn’t turned out that way.
By Caitlin Gibson December 28, 2021 at 10:21 a.m. EST Washington Post
She’d spent 15 grueling months as a single, working mom of two children in the coronavirus pandemic, so when Eliza McCoy stood in the bright sunlight at her older daughter’s elementary school graduation in June, she finally allowed herself a sense of hope. After months of remote schooling, followed by months of a hybrid schedule, the fifth-grade graduates were allowed to gather on the baseball field of their school in Alexandria, Va. The teachers gave speeches, the kids walked across the stage to collect their certificates, and it all felt almost normal, which in turn felt rather surreal.
“It was just momentous, to feel like things were getting better, like we were finally coming to the end of this thing,” McCoy says. She imagined that the world might look even more familiar and welcoming by the time her daughter, Gabriela, started sixth grade.
But when Gabriela joined her new middle school this fall, she found herself in a world of even stricter safety protocols, surrounded by peers who seemed to be struggling with the tension of the abrupt reentry. There were new rules about how to navigate the crowded hallways; arguments and physical fights between students were a daily occurrence.
“I remember her talking about it being jarring,” McCoy says. “There were lots of rules to learn, and when she told me there were physical altercations every day, I was just mind-blown.”
September once beckoned like a light on the horizon, with the promise of a full return to in-person school. But for countless families across the country, that hopeful glimmer proved to be more like a mirage, as school systems nationwide have grappled with myriad challenges this fall.
Eruptions of violence among students have led some schools to temporarily revert to virtual learning, hoping to quell the aggression. Exhausted teachers are quitting or considering early retirement. Mandatory quarantine periods and testing protocols mean that families are often faced with upended schedules. Kids who have been deprived of a stable learning environment and normal peer socialization for an extended period of time are finding the readjustment emotionally overwhelming — and they’re bringing their worries, questions and feelings about all of this home to their parents, who are faced with guiding their kids through yet another tumultuous transition.
McCoy, who works for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, is acutely aware that many children suffered significant trauma during the pandemic. So when Gabriela came home feeling confused and unsettled by the fights she was witnessing, McCoy explained to her daughter that her peers might be processing a lot of complicated emotions and experiences.
“In the beginning she would come home and talk about specific incidents in detail — she was surprised particularly by one fight between girls, because she had never seen that sort of punching, hitting and kicking between girls,” she says. “But now she’s become a little conditioned to it, so if you ask her about it now, she’s like ‘Yeah, Mom, it happens all the time, and I just make sure I’m away from it.’ ”
Karen Petruska, an associate professor of communication studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., says she’s grateful that her 3-year-old daughter, Margaret, and 6-year-old son, Henry, are young enough to be spared some of the psychological stress that older students are facing. But this school year has still been anxiety-producing for Petruska and her husband, who is also a professor, and their kids: “Margaret has had at least 10 covid tests,” Petruska says. “She’s at a new preschool, she’s exposed to a whole bunch of new kids, and so she gets sick — and every single time, you have to panic.”
No one in their household has had the coronavirus, Petruska says, yet they’ve spent plenty of time at home waiting for test results to come back, or for cold symptoms to resolve. “There was a day I missed a meeting because I had to drive 40 minutes to a different Walgreens to get more at-home tests,” she says. “But I support public health. It’s just the reality of living in a pandemic.”
McCoy shares that perspective — and as she and her parent friends have reconciled their hopes for this year against the reality they’re still facing, she says they’ve commiserated about how this transition sometimes feels like a new stage of grief. “We all wanted to go back to school so badly, and we felt like things were getting better,” she says. “But now it seems like it’s still so hard, just in different ways.”
The dreaded phone call came the weekend after Thanksgiving: A school official told Morgan Baden, a 42-year-old communications executive in Maplewood, N.J., that a child in her son’s preschool class had tested positive. “We get that call on a Sunday night, and suddenly our entire week has changed,” Baden says. “My husband and I have to sit down and figure out who changes what, which parts of our schedule can be adjusted and which can’t, who will cover which shift. It wasn’t our first quarantine, and I’m sure it won’t be our last.”
Baden’s 4-year-old son has autism, so quarantine means missing his daily therapies, she says, and it is especially challenging for him to be abruptly separated from his schedule. “We really depend on those routines to get him through the day. He needs to know what to expect,” she says. “Trying to get an autistic 4-year-old to embrace flexibility is a really big challenge.”
Gene Beresin, executive director for the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard, says educators have told him that they’ve seen more “fidgetiness, oppositional behavior and defiance,” in their classrooms this year. “The kids who are more extroverted are more likely to be defiant,” he says. “The kids who are more internal, who are introverted, those are the ones who get more depressed and anxious and isolated.”
Adolescents and teens are more likely to be attuned to the stresses that weighed on America’s children even before the pandemic — worries about climate change, gun violence, economic inequality, racism — while younger kids might still be struggling with the abrupt separation from their parents after so much time together, Beresin says.
A disproportionate burden will fall, as it always does, on the most vulnerable children, including “underserved populations who have limited resources, who face environmental problems, who are dealing with unemployment, family stress, or poverty,” Beresin says, as well as children who were already coping with mental health or learning disorders.
It was February 2020 when a teacher suggested to Erin Neal, a 50-year-old aerospace lobbyist in Arlington, Va., that Neal’s now-8-year-old son, Ollie, should be tested for learning disabilities. But the testing was delayed by the pandemic, and it wasn’t until December 2020 that Ollie was diagnosed with dyslexia. “Now he’s finally getting a ton of services, which is fantastic, and he’s almost back up to grade level,” Neal says. “But he’s so exhausted. He’s getting pulled out of class half the day for interventions, and then he’s going after school to meet with a private tutor. … They’re doing so much to help him get caught up, and that’s great, but his little brain and heart and body are just physically fried by the time he gets home.”
The effects reverberate through the whole family, she says: “Any little ruffle or disturbance — a forgotten coat, a misunderstood joke, a cup of spilled milk, the loss of a board game, his sister selecting the wrong family movie — can set his emotions off course, causing a cascading effect to ruin his mood, and consequently the family’s entire day or evening.”
As a mother of four and a business manager at an elementary charter school in Annapolis, Md., Ratasha Harley has seen the emotional fallout of the pandemic from distinct vantage points. Just a couple of weeks ago, a young student told her that he’d been having suicidal ideations, and she took him immediately to meet with the school counselor. “There are emotional breakdowns, and I think kids are just not really knowing how to handle things that I think they would have handled seamlessly before,” she says. “The mental toll that all of this has taken on children, I don’t think we’ll ever really be able to measure that.”
As a parent, she is relieved that her own children, who range in age from 11 to 15, have shown such resilience throughout the transition. “I think what’s been so inspiring for me watching my children is that they were all so excited to go back to school,” Harley says. “Even my younger daughter, who is my introvert, who doesn’t have a lot of friends … but I could see how being isolated really affected her; it affected her grades, it affected her emotionally. And I thought that the biggest problem would be getting them up in the morning, getting them back into a routine, but the fact is that they were so excited just to be back in the school building.”
When McCoy’syounger daughter, Lena, started kindergarten during the pandemic, McCoy grieved the loss of a rite of passage — the proud moment when her little girl would walk into school for the first time. Instead, Lena was home with her mom for the entire school year, and when she returned to in-person school for first grade in September, she struggled with severe separation anxiety.Advertisement
“She just really devolved in that first month of school,” McCoy says. The school counselor told her that Lena’s response was not unusual, she says, “especially for kids going into first grade who missed that first-day-of-school transition into independent education the year before.”
Things have slowly been improving since then, and one recent afternoon as McCoy picked Lena up at school, the 7-year-old hopped into the car and declared: “Mom, I love my school!” McCoy was stunned. “I asked her, ‘Is it something specific that happened today?’ And she said, ‘No! It’s just great.’ ”
McCoy knew the epiphany might not last. There would surely be more quarantines, more safety protocols, more emotional fatigue in the new year. But in that moment, Lena was happy to be at school, and McCoy was so relieved that she started to cry.
Four months into this strange new school year, there is a mix of cautious optimism and weary resignation as parents look ahead. Vaccines for school-aged kids finally arrived, but so did the omicron variant. There is the feeling that we’re learning how to navigate all this, how to adapt to the altered landscape.
“I feel like there was a general sense that once the vaccines rolled out, we would be well on a path toward normalcy — and I think that narrative has changed a bit,” Baden says. “But I will say it feels a lot better than it felt this time last year, and I feel like I’m both a lot more optimistic and more realistic. I don’t think I foresee schools closing the way they did last year in the future.” She laughs nervously. “Hopefully.”
By Caitlin GibsonCaitlin Gibson is a feature writer at The Washington Post. Since joining The Post in 2005, she has contributed feature stories, essays, long-form enterprise and local news to the paper and The Washington Post Magazine. Twitter
We trust that beyond absence there is a presence. That beyond the pain there can be healing. That beyond the brokenness there can be wholeness. That beyond the anger there may be peace. That beyond the hurting there may be forgiveness. That beyond the silence there may be the word. That beyond the word there may be understanding. That through understanding there is love. — Unknown
TRIBUTE TO ARCHBISHOP EMERITUS DESMOND MPILO TUTU.
The late Archbishop emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu passed away on Sunday 26 December 2021 in Cape Town. He was 90 years old. The Archbishop had been battling cancer since about 1998. The nation is in mourning. A phenomenal public citizen has departed, and the citizens are left bereft.
Archbishop Tutu was quintessentially a churchman, a spiritual leader, and a moral guide to this nation over a period of some 45 years since he broke into public life in South Africa when, as Dean of Johannesburg, he wrote that prophetic open letter to the Mr BJ Vorster, then Prime Minister of the National Party Government that was in power. In that letter he boldly warned about the catastrophe that was looming as young Black people would no longer tolerate the conditions of life that apartheid was imposing on them, and that the townships ghettoes were bursting with anger and resentment. As history would have it, on 16 June 1976 the Soweto Students’ protests erupted barely three months since Tutu’s letter was written to the apartheid authorities and for which he never received even the decency of an acknowledgement.
But that was not all there was about Archbishop Tutu. As General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, the now Bishop Desmond Tutu, championed an ecumenical vision that was founded on justice, equality, and the dignity of the human person. The SACC was organized to be able to respond to human needs in South Africa and to denounce all that denied the capacity of God’s people to become more fully human. During that time a programme to support those who were prisoners of conscience, those who were banned or banished from their homes by the system, victims of forced removals and the churches were mobilized to provide care for their dependents of such victims of a pernicious system. He led the churches into a world-wide movement to boycott the apartheid state and called for sanctions to be applied against the apartheid regime.
As Bishop of Johannesburg and later as Archbishop of Cape Town, Archbishop Desmond Tutu accomplished three extraordinary feats. He caused the world community to recognize the SACC as an alternative governmental forum in South Africa that met the developmental needs of the poor whereas the apartheid state sought to oppress and suppress free expression and indulged in inhumane treatment of citizens on the basis of colour. Secondly, in his time he sought to unite all South Africans and to recognise the leadership of the people even if they were incarcerated on Robben Island or exiles based in neighbouring states, or their organisations whether they were banned or not. He insisted on his right to recognize any and never to be dictated to by the apartheid regime in recognizing who the leaders of the people would be. He freely travelled and he freely met and ministered to those who were in the liberation movement. He affirmed that Nelson Mandela was destined to become the President of South Africa.
Thirdly, he recognized that as the apartheid system was facing defeat, notwithstanding that a war was unleashed against the people by agents of the apartheid state. He decried negative stereotypes of our struggle as in the pernicious practice of necklacing, and he prevented gang justice against those suspected to be agents of the apartheid system thereby risking his own life. For him, while the Peace Process was paramount, it needed to be understood as provoked by the apartheid state itself as it sought to further entrench itself and to avoid the inevitable.
It is fair to say that that the work he did in his militant opposition to apartheid and in his indefatigable quest for peace even in difficult circumstances won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. South Africans were ecstatic, and the apartheid state was morose as yet another brick in the apartheid system was set to fall. Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu received many international accolades and awards from states as far apart as US, Britain and India; from over 100 universities and from many other international bodies. He served as President of the All Africa Conference of Churches and there he was honoured for his PanAfrican vision.
Archbishop emeritus Tutu fashioned his life and the church that he served to become truly the agents of reconciliation by expressing with urgency the need for national identity and social cohesion. It was then that for him the defining characteristic of South Africa was as a rainbow nation of God. Thus, he spoke of his dreams about South Africa as a home for all her people – something that was at loggerheads with the apartheid dictat, and that was of course at the heart of the Freedom Charter.
To many, he may have made a mistake in announcing that now that the leadership of the liberation movement was back, he was happy to withdraw to his church responsibilities. While that may have been said in a lighthearted manner or as a dig on those who accused him of having political ambitions. He sought to establish the church as a critical partner in development and in nation-building.
As it happened, the National Conference of Churches held in Rustenburg Conference in 1990 provided an opportunity for the churches to reflect together on the role of the churches and to make a common declaration considering the political changes that were then underway. The Conference became famous for the confessions made by the delegates from the DRC Churches, but more seriously the Conference called for a new solidarity in nation building.
That became the mission of Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu for the remainder of his episcopate. Upon his retirement as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1996, he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela as Chairperson of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. In that capacity he drove this nation to revealing as true a nature of the inhumanity of apartheid as one could; amnesty was granted, and reparations proposed. The TRC laid bare the depravity of the apartheid system and gave credence if any was needed to the charge by the international community that apartheid was a crime against humanity.
Archbishop Tutu became identified worldwide as the face of the TRC. He empathized with the victims; he was outraged by the sheer inhumanity and dehumanization of the apartheid police, and he shared the pain of the survivors and their families, and he lamented leaders in government, church and society pretended that they were ignorant of the goings-on in the security system that they did nothing about for far too long. In many respects he became a Pastor Niemoller of our times.
In his life Archbishop emeritus became a teacher and a prophet. He reminded this nation about its truest values of ubuntu and, to the recalcitrant, he pronounced the wrath of God in no uncertain terms. As a public figure he was never in doubt about his role in society. He was proud to be a South Africa under our constitutional dispensation but when, soon thereafter the democratic dispensation became self-serving and simply perpetuated the inequalities of the past, he did not hesitate to denounce policies that failed to change the system bequeathed by apartheid. When the politicians showed no regard for the poor and the needy, he decried the state in which our country had found itself.
South Africa has lost a great South African. He was a global figure who had his feet on the ground; a spiritual and a church leader who was guided only by the prescripts of the gospel. As Shakespeare puts it:
“he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs…”
This is the time for this nation to take stock and to press the re-set button if it is to honour the teachings of and celebrate the life of such a great South African.”
The Thabo Mbeki Foundation was honoured to partner with the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation to establish the National Foundations Dialogue Initiative as an instrument to encourage the nation to bring matters to resolution by dialogue, and to abjure conflict, and ethnic sentimentality and other narrow and exclusionary identities.
The Patron of the TMF, President Thabo Mbeki, our Board and the Staff would like to convey our deepest condolences mam’uNomalizo Leah Tutu, their children; Trevor Thamsanqa, Thandeka Theresa, Nontombi Naomi, Mpho Andrea and the entire Tutu family. May he rest in eternal peace!
Issued by the Thabo Mbeki Foundation 28 December 2021
This Christmas, hope may feel elusive. But despair is not the answer.
By Michael Gerson Washington Post Columnist December 23, 2021 at 4:23 p.m. EST
Many in our country have lost the simple confidence that better days are ahead, for a variety of understandable reasons. There are the coronavirus’s false dawns, followed by new fears. There are rising prices and empty store shelves, as if in Soviet Romania. There is Afghanistan, descending into man-made catastrophe. There are increases in urban violence. And deeply embedded racial injustice. And an environment buckling under terrible strains. Everything seems crying out in chaotic chorus: Things are not getting better.
That spirit possesses our politics. The right sees a country in cultural decline, stripped of its identify and values. The left fears we are moving toward a new American authoritarianism. Both are ideologies of prophesied loss. In a society, such resentments easily become septic. So many otherwise irenic people seem captured by the politics of the clenched fist. A portion seem to genuinely wish some of their neighbors humiliation and harm.
Under such circumstances, it can feel impossible to sustain hope. Yet from a young age, if we are lucky, we are taught that hope itself sustains. It is one of the most foundational assurances of childhood for a parent to bend down and tell a crying child: It is okay. It will be all better. We have an early, instinctual desire to know that trials are temporary, that wounds will heal and all will be well in the end. When a child abuser violates such a promise, it is the cruelest possible betrayal. When young people and adults lose confidence in the possibility of a better day, it can result in the diseases and ravages of despair: drug addiction leading to overdose, alcoholism leading to liver failure, depression leading to suicide.
A columnist living through an appropriate column illustration should probably disclose it. I have been dealing with cancer for a long time. For most of that period, the cancer was trying to kill me without my feeling it. It was internal and theoretical. Now I have reached a different and unpleasant phase, in which the cancer is trying to kill me and making me feel it — the phase when life plans become unknitted and the people you love watch you be weak.
I am not near death and don’t plan to be soon. But there is a time in the progress of a disease such as mine when you believe that you will recover, that you will get better. And I have passed the point when that hope is credible. Now, God or fate has spoken. And the words clank down like iron gates: No, it will not be okay. You will not be getting better.
Such reflections flow naturally when you are writing from the antiseptic wonderland of the holiday hospital ward. But nearly every life eventually involves such tests of hope. Some questions, even when not urgent, are universal: How can we make sense of blind and stupid suffering? How do we live with purpose amid events that scream of unfair randomness? What sustains hope when there is scant reason for it?
The context of the Nativity story is misunderstood hope. The prophets and Jewish people waited for centuries in defiant expectation forthe Messiah to deliver Israel from exile and enemies. This was essentially the embodied belief that something different and better was possible — that some momentous divine intervention could change everything.
But the long-expected event arrived in an entirely unexpected form. Not as the triumph of politics and power, but in shocking humility and vulnerability. The world’s desire in a puking infant. Angelic choirs performing for people of no social account. A glimpse of glory along with the smell of animal dung. Clearly, we are being invited by this holy plot twist to suspend our disbelief for a moment and consider some revolutionary revision of spiritual truth.
Or at least this is what the story says, which we try to interpret beneath limited, even conflicting texts. No matter how we react to the historicity of each element, however, the Nativity presents the inner reality of God’s arrival.
He is a God who goes to ridiculous lengths to seek us.
He is a God who chose the low way: power in humility; strength perfected in weakness; the last shall be first; blessed are the least of these.
He is a God who was cloaked in blood and bone and destined for human suffering — which he does not try to explain to us, but rather just shares. It is perhaps the hardest to fathom: the astounding vulnerability of God.
And he is a God of hope, who offers a different kind of security than the fulfillment of our deepest wishes. He promises a transformation of the heart in which we release the burden of our desires, and live in expectation of God’s unfolding purposes, until all his mercies stand revealed.
There is an almost infinite number of ways other than angelic choirs that God announces his arrival. I have friends who have experienced a lightning strike of undeniable mission, or who see God in the deep beauty of nature, or know Jesus in serving the dispossessed.
For me, such assurances do not come easy or often. Mine are less grand vista than brief glimpse behind a curtain. In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” she wrote of an “incandescent” light that can possess “the most obtuse objects” and “grant / A brief respite from fear.” Plath concluded: “Miracles occur, / If you care to call those spasmodic / Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again, / The long wait for the angel. / For that rare, random descent.”
Christmas hope may well fall in the psychological category of wish fulfillment. But that does not disprove the possibility of actually fulfilled wishes. On Christmas, we consider the disorienting, vivid evidence that hope wins. If true, it is a story that can reorient every human story. It means that God is with us, even in suffering. It is the assurance, as from a parent, as from an angel, as from a savior: It is okay. And even at the extreme of death (quoting Julian of Norwich): “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
By Doris Iarovici December 18, 2021 at 9:00 a.m. EST
The first-year student in my office was terrified. Here he was, finally living on the campus of the college he had dreamed of attending, and instead of joy, he experienced an unsettling sense of unreality.FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirus
The world around him felt off; strange. Worse: He felt off, detached from himself. Too aware of everything he said and did, and at the same time, removed, not relating. The numbness and inability to connect had persisted over a couple of days, triggering panic.
How would he navigate the transition from high school to college if he could not connect? Was he losing his mind?
Derealization and depersonalization — the subjective experiences of unreality of either the outside world or of the self — are fairly common, usually transient phenomena. I am used to hearing about them from the young adults I treat as a college psychiatrist, although these complaints usually come up as side-notes rather than the presenting concern.
But the first week back in my campus office in Cambridge, Mass., this fall, after 18 months of virtual practice because of the pandemic, several students came to see me in crisis specifically because of these symptoms. I began to wonder if the return to school has upended our understanding of reality in new or particular ways.
Many of us have experienced brief moments where we feel as if we’re in a dream or in a fog or numb. We might feel disconnected from, or floating beside or above, our own body: too keenly aware of actions that normally happen without our consciousness. Usually this happens when we’re very tired or significantly stressed. It’s a frequent response to trauma. Alcohol, cannabis and other drugs can also be triggers.
But my patient was experiencing these feelings sober, just as he finally got to do something he’d wanted to do for a long time. I might have attributed his symptoms to the stress of starting college and leaving home for the first time, had I not also seen upper-class students with similar difficulties. One student who had navigated travel abroad during the pandemic — a particularly challenging task — felt especially disconnected upon return to the familiarity of campus.
Of course, campus is and is not familiar this year. As I walked across the main quad that first week back, the word “surreal” bubbled up in conversation after conversation among the undergraduates not sitting in my office. An editorial in the student newspaper described how watching the campus come alive again felt “like a dream.”
In an informal survey of my colleagues who work in college counseling centers nationwide, other clinicians agreed they had seen an increase in student complaints of depersonalization or derealization. Some had noticed this over the course of the pandemic, not just when most campuses reopened a few months ago. One psychiatrist commented that even pre-pandemic, she encountered these symptoms more frequently among college students than among adults in other settings where she had worked, such as in a clinic for people with chronic mental illness.
Although depersonalization and derealization can occur in a variety of psychiatric disorders, from the early stages of psychoses to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic disorder, they’re quite common in the general population. Incidence decreases with age, and young people seem more susceptible. Although exact rates in college students are not known, surveys of students not in treatment for psychiatric conditions reported depersonalization or derealization experiences in 8 to 46 percent of respondents, depending on the method used.
In one pre-covid-19 study of over a thousand adults in rural North Carolina in 2001, nearly 1 in 4 reported depersonalization or derealization over the past year. The detachment from self more commonly occurred when people felt nervous or depressed, or after a severe stress. Derealization seemed more frequent when people felt they had experienced something dangerous.
During the pandemic, we’ve all felt a sustained sense of danger. Most of the students now on campus have endured more than a year and a half in isolation, a particular challenge for adolescents and young adults. The normal fears about making friends and keeping up academically are accentuated. And uncertainty persists.Advertisement
Limited socializing is allowed now among vaccinated students, but there are so many rules and restrictions. People continue to get sick. New variants appear, triggering fears of endless cycles of isolation. Some students have lost family members or friends to the coronavirus, or have been sick themselves. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that more students might experience more intense dissociative symptoms.
And reality has been significantly altered for us all.
We’ve become accustomed to interacting online more than in person. For me, a sense of unreality was most acute when we went into lockdown last March: the experience of being cut off from everything usual in my life was disorienting. But my return to work on campus felt reassuringly normal, even with the strangeness of continued mask-wearing and other new protocols. In-person activities make up the bulk of my lived experience.Advertisement
For young adults, who were already spending more time online than we nondigital natives did, 18 months constitutes a bigger proportion of their lives. Perhaps this more firmly entrenches in their brain that virtual life is the norm. For some, then, live interactions become more jarring. And with the rise of extremely divisive discourse online, and disagreements over basic scientific truths, we are all bombarded with challenges to our shared understanding of reality.
Most people who experience depersonalization and derealization find that it improves within a few weeks, without professional intervention. The understanding that these are normal responses to significant stress, fatigue or some substances often helps symptoms fade.
One study showed improvement in patients instructed to direct their attention to the bodily sensation of breathing. In general, mindfulness meditation techniques help ground people experiencing dissociation.Advertisement
Distraction is also helpful, especially when it involves talking to or being around other people, instead of isolating. Labeling the feeling, and redirecting the attention to another activity, such as listening to music or exercising, can help.
My students improved rapidly with treatment, which included a combination of talk therapy and medicine. They told me they valued the opportunity to examine their strange experiences without fear that they would be labeled crazy. Should the symptoms continue, worsen or recur, other treatments can help.
In a time of unprecedented disruptions, the surreal has become commonplace.
Doris Iarovici is a psychiatrist at Harvard University and the author of “Mental Health Issues and the University Student.”
From reframing our notion of “good” schools to mining the magic of expert teachers, here’s a curated list of must-read research from 2021.By Youki Terada, Stephen Merrill, Sarah GonserDecember 9, 2021 Edutopia
It was a year of unprecedented hardship for teachers and school leaders. We pored through dozens of studies to see if we could follow the trail of exactly what happened: The research revealed a complex portrait of a grueling year during which persistent issues of burnout and mental and physical health impacted millions of educators. Meanwhile, many of the old debates continued: Does paper beat digital? Is project-based learning as effective as direct instruction? How do you define what a “good” school is?
Other studies grabbed our attention, and in a few cases, made headlines. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University turned artificial intelligence loose on some 1,130 award-winning children’s books in search of invisible patterns of bias. (Spoiler alert: They found some.) Another study revealed why many parents are reluctant to support social and emotional learning in schools—and provided hints about how educators can flip the script.
1. WHAT PARENTS FEAR ABOUT SEL (AND HOW TO CHANGE THEIR MINDS)
When researchers at the Fordham Institute asked parents to rank phrases associated with social and emotional learning, nothing seemed to add up. The term “social-emotional learning” was very unpopular; parents wanted to steer their kids clear of it. But when the researchers added a simple clause, forming a new phrase—”social-emotional & academic learning”—the program shot all the way up to No. 2 in the rankings.
What gives?
Parents were picking up subtle cues in the list of SEL-related terms that irked or worried them, the researchers suggest. Phrases like “soft skills” and “growth mindset” felt “nebulous” and devoid of academic content. For some, the language felt suspiciously like “code for liberal indoctrination.”
But the study suggests that parents might need the simplest of reassurances to break through the political noise. Removing the jargon, focusing on productive phrases like “life skills,” and relentlessly connecting SEL to academic progress puts parents at ease—and seems to save social and emotional learning in the process.
2. THE SECRET MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES OF EXPERT TEACHERS
In the hands of experienced teachers, classroom management can seem almost invisible: Subtle techniques are quietly at work behind the scenes, with students falling into orderly routines and engaging in rigorous academic tasks almost as if by magic.
That’s no accident, according to new research. While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations.
Focusing on the underlying dynamics of classroom behavior—and not on surface-level disruptions—means that expert teachers often look the other way at all the right times, too. Rather than rise to the bait of a minor breach in etiquette, a common mistake of new teachers, they tend to play the long game, asking questions about the origins of misbehavior, deftly navigating the terrain between discipline and student autonomy, and opting to confront misconduct privately when possible.
3. THE SURPRISING POWER OF PRETESTING
Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing.
But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. Surprisingly, pretesting even beat out taking practice tests after learning the material, a proven strategy endorsed by cognitive scientists and educators alike. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 49 percent on a follow-up test, while outperforming students who took practice tests after studying the material by 27 percent.
The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material—and adding grist to a 2018 study that found that making educated guesses helped students connect background knowledge to new material.
Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right.
4. CONFRONTING AN OLD MYTH ABOUT IMMIGRANT STUDENTS
Immigrant students are sometimes portrayed as a costly expense to the education system, but new research is systematically dismantling that myth.
In a 2021 study, researchers analyzed over 1.3 million academic and birth records for students in Florida communities, and concluded that the presence of immigrant students actually has “a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students,” raising test scores as the size of the immigrant school population increases. The benefits were especially powerful for low-income students.
While immigrants initially “face challenges in assimilation that may require additional school resources,” the researchers concluded, hard work and resilience may allow them to excel and thus “positively affect exposed U.S.-born students’ attitudes and behavior.” But according to teacher Larry Ferlazzo, the improvements might stem from the fact that having English language learners in classes improves pedagogy, pushing teachers to consider “issues like prior knowledge, scaffolding, and maximizing accessibility.”
5. A FULLER PICTURE OF WHAT A ‘GOOD’ SCHOOL IS
It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020. That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found.
The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores.
“Schools that promote socio-emotional development actually have a really big positive impact on kids,” said lead researcher C. Kirabo Jackson in an interview with Edutopia. “And these impacts are particularly large for vulnerable student populations who don’t tend to do very well in the education system.”
The findings reinforce the importance of a holistic approach to measuring student progress, and are a reminder that schools—and teachers—can influence students in ways that are difficult to measure, and may only materialize well into the future.
6. TEACHING IS LEARNING
One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick?
In a 2021 study, researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student.
The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading.
The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories.
7. A DISTURBING STRAIN OF BIAS IN KIDS’ BOOKS
Some of the most popular and well-regarded children’s books—Caldecott and Newbery honorees among them—persistently depict Black, Asian, and Hispanic characters with lighter skin, according to new research.
Using artificial intelligence, researchers combed through 1,130 children’s books written in the last century, comparing two sets of diverse children’s books—one a collection of popular books that garnered major literary awards, the other favored by identity-based awards. The software analyzed data on skin tone, race, age, and gender.
Among the findings: While more characters with darker skin color begin to appear over time, the most popular books—those most frequently checked out of libraries and lining classroom bookshelves—continue to depict people of color in lighter skin tones. More insidiously, when adult characters are “moral or upstanding,” their skin color tends to appear lighter, the study’s lead author, Anjali Aduki, told The 74, with some books converting “Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige.” Female characters, meanwhile, are often seen but not heard.
Cultural representations are a reflection of our values, the researchers conclude: “Inequality in representation, therefore, constitutes an explicit statement of inequality of value.”
8. THE NEVER-ENDING ‘PAPER VERSUS DIGITAL’ WAR
The argument goes like this: Digital screens turn reading into a cold and impersonal task; they’re good for information foraging, and not much more. “Real” books, meanwhile, have a heft and “tactility” that make them intimate, enchanting—and irreplaceable.
But researchers have often found weak or equivocal evidence for the superiority of reading on paper. While a recent study concluded that paper books yielded better comprehension than e-books when many of the digital tools had been removed, the effect sizes were small. A 2021 meta-analysis further muddies the water: When digital and paper books are “mostly similar,” kids comprehend the print version more readily—but when enhancements like motion and sound “target the story content,” e-books generally have the edge.
Nostalgia is a force that every new technology must eventually confront. There’s plenty of evidence that writing with pen and paper encodes learning more deeply than typing. But new digital book formats come preloaded with powerful tools that allow readers to annotate, look up words, answer embedded questions, and share their thinking with other readers.
We may not be ready to admit it, but these are precisely the kinds of activities that drive deeper engagement, enhance comprehension, and leave us with a lasting memory of what we’ve read. The future of e-reading, despite the naysayers, remains promising.
9. NEW RESEARCH MAKES A POWERFUL CASE FOR PBL
Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies.
Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms.
Now two new large-scale studies—encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students.
In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia, elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.
10. TRACKING A TUMULTUOUS YEAR FOR TEACHERS
The Covid-19 pandemic cast a long shadow over the lives of educators in 2021, according to a year’s worth of research.
The average teacher’s workload suddenly “spiked last spring,” wrote the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its January 2021 report, and then—in defiance of the laws of motion—simply never let up. By the fall, a RAND study recorded an astonishing shift in work habits: 24 percent of teachers reported that they were working 56 hours or more per week, compared to 5 percent pre-pandemic.
The vaccine was the promised land, but when it arrived nothing seemed to change. In an April 2021 survey conducted four months after the first vaccine was administered in New York City, 92 percent of teachers said their jobs were more stressful than prior to the pandemic, up from 81 percent in an earlier survey.
It wasn’t just the length of the work days; a close look at the research reveals that the school system’s failure to adjust expectations was ruinous. It seemed to start with the obligations of hybrid teaching, which surfaced in Edutopia’s coverage of overseas school reopenings. In June 2020, well before many U.S. schools reopened, we reported that hybrid teaching was an emerging problem overseas, and warned that if the “model is to work well for any period of time,” schools must “recognize and seek to reduce the workload for teachers.” Almost eight months later, a 2021 RAND study identified hybrid teaching as a primary source of teacher stress in the U.S., easily outpacing factors like the health of a high-risk loved one.
New and ever-increasing demands for tech solutions put teachers on a knife’s edge. In several important 2021 studies, researchers concluded that teachers were being pushed to adopt new technology without the “resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use.” Consequently, they were spending more than 20 hours a week adapting lessons for online use, and experiencing an unprecedented erosion of the boundaries between their work and home lives, leading to an unsustainable “always on” mentality. When it seemed like nothing more could be piled on—when all of the lights were blinking red—the federal government restarted standardized testing.
Change will be hard; many of the pathologies that exist in the system now predate the pandemic. But creating strict school policies that separate work from rest, eliminating the adoption of new tech tools without proper supports, distributing surveys regularly to gauge teacher well-being, and above all listening to educators to identify and confront emerging problems might be a good place to start, if the research can be believed.
To Unite a Divided America, Make People Work for It
Dr. Holloway is the president of Rutgers University, a historian and the author, most recently, of “The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans.” July 2, 2021
This essay is part of a series exploring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment. Read more about this project in a note from Ezekiel Kweku, Opinion’s politics editor.
If we Americans listened to one another, perhaps we would recognize how absurd our discourse has become. It is our own fault that political discussions today are hotheaded arguments over whether the hooligans storming the halls of the Capitol were taking a tour or fomenting an insurrection; if we broadened our audiences, perhaps we would see the fallacy of claims that all Republicans are committed to voter suppression and that all Democrats are committed to voter fraud.
It seems like an easy challenge to address, but we lack the incentives to change our behavior. We are all, regardless of where we sit on the political spectrum, caught in a vortex of intoxication. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that our followers on social media are our friends. They aren’t. They are our mirrors, recordings of our own thoughts and images played back to us, by us and for us. We feel good about ourselves, sure, but do we feel good as citizens? Do we feel good as Americans? Are we better off? Is America?
There are many problems in America, but fundamental to so many of them is our unwillingness to learn from one another, to see and respect one another, to become familiar with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and who hold different political views. It will take work to repair this problem, but building blocks exist. A good foundation would be a one-year mandatory national service program.
Nearly 90 years ago, in response to the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps, what was then America’s largest organized nationwide civilian service program. About 30 years later, President Lyndon Johnson brought to fruition President John Kennedy’s “domestic Peace Corps” initiative, the Volunteers in Service to America program, known as VISTA. Today, domestic civilian service is dominated by AmeriCorps and nongovernmental programs like Teach for America.
Taken together, these programs have been enormously successful at putting people to work, broadening the reach of basic social services related to education, health and welfare. Most important, they have helped citizens see the crucial role that they can play in strengthening our democracy. Given that we know service programs can be so effective in shoring up the nation in moments of crisis, the time has come for a broader initiative, with higher aspirations and goals. The time has come for compulsory national service for all young people — with no exceptions.
Universal national service would include one year of civilian service or military service for all adults to be completed before they reach the age of 25, with responsibilities met domestically or around the world. It would channel the conscience of the Civilian Conservation Corps and put young people in the wilderness repairing the ravages of environmental destruction. It would draw on the lessons of the Peace Corps and dispatch young Americans to distant lands where they would understand the challenges of poor countries and of people for whom basic health and nutrition are aspirational goals. It would draw on the success of our military programs that in the past created pathways toward financial stability and educational progress for those with limited resources while serving as great unifiers among America’s races, religions and social classes.Share this article.
These are but three examples. A one-year universal national service program could take many other forms, but it is easy to imagine that it could be a vehicle to provide necessary support to underserved urban and rural communities, help eliminate food deserts, contribute to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, enrich our arts and culture, and bolster our community health clinics, classrooms and preschools.
Furthermore, because service would be mandatory, it would force all of our young people to better know one another, creating the opportunities to learn about and appreciate our differences. Speaking as an educator, I know that we get better answers to complex problems when we assemble teams from a wide range of backgrounds. Once these teams realize that they have a common purpose, their collective differences and diversity in race, gender, expertise, faith, sexual orientation and political orientation start to emerge as a strength. If you look at the state of our civic culture, it is clear that we have a long way to go before we can claim that we are doing the best that we can. The kind of experiential education I am advocating could change a life, could open a mind and could save a democracy.
A sensible system of compulsory national service would build bridges between people and turn them into citizens. It would shore up our fragile communities and strengthen us as individuals and as a nation. Compulsory national service would make us more self-reliant and at the same time more interdependent. It would help us to realize our remarkable individual strengths and would reveal the enormous collective possibilities when we pull together instead of rip apart.
At its core, we need to heed the call for citizenship. We need to take the natural inclination to help out our friends and families and turn it into a willingness to support strangers. We need to inspire people to answer the call to serve because in so doing, they will discover ways to have their voices heard and their communities seen and respected.
This is neither a new nor a partisan idea. This call to serve and inspire is written into the preamble of the United States Constitution. When the founders sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty,” they were talking about establishing an ethos of citizenship and participation.
Compulsory national service is not a panacea, but neither is it a mere placebo. It could be a very real solution to a very real problem that already has wrought havoc on our democracy and that threatens our future as a nation, our viability as a culture and our very worth as human beings. This nation and its democratic principles need our help. We can and must do better.
Jonathan Holloway is the president of Rutgers University, a historian and the author, most recently, of “The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans.”
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Bob Dole, who died on Sunday, represented Kansas in the U.S. Senate from 1969 to 1996, including as Senate majority leader, and was the 1996 Republican nominee for president. This column was drafted early in 2021 to be published around the time of his death.
Shortly after I was elected Senate majority leader in November 1984, a friend stopped by the Capitol to offer his congratulations. We toured my office, reviewing pictures of past majority leaders and admiring two portraits of personal heroes: Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Something about the place, steeped in such distinguished history, touched a common nerve in us. We fell silent for a time, when a smile crossed my friend’s face. With wonder, he said, “Imagine a kid from Russell, Kansas, having an office like this.”
My home at birth was a three-room house. I grew up during the Dust Bowl, when so many of us helplessly watched our livelihoods blow away with the wind. I have always felt humbled to live in a nation that would allow my unlikely story to unfold.
Many nights during my time as majority leader, I would step out on my office balcony overlooking the National Mall and be reminded of what made my journey possible. Facing me were monuments to our nation’s first commander in chief, the author of our Declaration of Independence, and the president who held our union together. In the distance were the countless graves of those who gave their lives so that we could live free.
That inspiring view came back to me as I watched the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol. I imagined the view of those monuments and headstones obscured by clouds of tear gas. I thought about the symbol of our democracy consumed by anger, hatred and violence.
There has been a lot of talk about what it will take to heal our country. We have heard many of our leaders profess “bipartisanship.” But we must remember that bipartisanship is the minimum we should expect from ourselves.
America has never achieved greatness when Republicans and Democrats simply manage to work together or tolerate each other. We have overcome our biggest challenges only when we focused on our shared values and experiences. These common ties form much stronger bonds than political parties.
I cannot pretend that I have not been a loyal champion for my party, but I always served my country best when I did so first and foremost as an American. I fought for veterans benefits not as a Republican but as someone who witnessed the heroism of our service members firsthand. I advocated for those with disabilities not as a member of the GOP but as someone who personally understood the limitations of a world without basic accommodations. I stood up for those going hungry not as a leader in my party but as someone who had seen too many folks sweat through a hard day’s work without being able to put dinner on the table.
When we prioritize principles over party and humanity over personal legacy, we accomplish far more as a nation. By leading with a shared faith in each other, we become America at its best: a beacon of hope, a source of comfort in crisis, a shield against those who threaten freedom.
Our nation’s recent political challenges remind us that our standing as the leader of the free world is not simply destiny. It is a deliberate choice that every generation must make and work toward. We cannot do it divided.
I do have hope that our country will rediscover its greatness. Perhaps it is the optimism that comes from spending 98 years as a proud American. I grew up in what others have called the Greatest Generation. Together, we put an end to Nazi tyranny. Our nation confronted Jim Crow, split the atom, eliminated the anguish of polio, planted our flag on the moon and tore down the Berlin Wall. Rising above partisanship, we made historic gains in feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. To make a more perfect union, we swung open the doors of economic opportunity for women who were ready to rise to their fullest potential and leave shattered glass ceilings behind them.
Our nation has certainly faced periods of division. But at the end of the day, we have always found ways to come together.Advertisement
We can find that unity again.
In 1951, when I was newly elected to the Kansas House of Representatives, a reporter asked me what I had on my agenda. I said, “Well, I’m going to sit back and watch for a few days, and then I’ll stand up for what I think is right.” In 1996, when I left public office for the final time, I announced the same plans, to sit back for a few days, then start standing up for what I thought was right.
After sharing these thoughts, I plan to once again return to my seat to sit back and watch. Though this time, I will count on tomorrow’s leaders to stand up for what is right for America. With full optimism and faith in our nation’s humanity, I know they will.
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