by Dexter Chapin. Available at your favorite bookstore.
The American Idea, Resiliency, and Thrivancy Education
by Dexter Chapin, with a foreword by Barry Clemson
PREFACE
I did not plan to become a teacher but through happenstance fell into the only job I might be good at. I loved teaching and am proud to have been a teacher, but that is not the point. Schools give teachers the opportunity, if they choose, to sit in one of the best possible grandstand seats to observe what is happening in their community and beyond. They have a raft of reporters arriving every day ready to tell their story as they come through the door. Not always in words, not always in actions, sometimes in silence, and sometimes in tragedies.
Students have the capacity to point out the blind spots, the unseen, unheard, and ignored. I spent over half a century in K-12 education being educated by kids. It’s not always students. Parents, administrators, occasionally police or a judge, and often other teachers, coaches and staff deliver the news. You watch, you listen, you ask a question every now and then, and you see, you learn, and sometimes you understand, and sometimes you respond.
This book is a response. I treasured my place in the grandstand, made possible by my teachers, my mentors, and my coaches. This book is a precis of all that I learned from my kids, the adults, and my experience.
This is not intended as an academic treatise. The references are almost all readily available, popular sources if the reader wishes to explore farther. The older, referenced books are available in digital formats. I have taken what is commonly known and woven it into a new pattern that generates hope that we can regain the ability to thrive.
I expect my readers to be those people who look out the window and wonder why America seems to be moving backwards? How did we elect the people we elected? Why are we banning books? Why are we losing ground financially, socially, and spiritually? It is too easy to call something fascist, and I never do, but the expression used to be, “The clouds of Fascism are always on the horizon in America, but it rains in Europe.” These days, the rain squalls are coming closer. They are just one town, or one state, over. How is this happening in America and what can we do about it? This book provides an answer those questions.
In 1995, William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted that by 2025, America would be in a crisis, labelled the 4th Turning. In 2023, Neil Howe published, The Fourth Turning is Here, confirming that the crisis had arrived on schedule. His description of today’s United States confirms their predictions and is frightening, powerful, and complete. (p 225 – 247)
The crisis is really here, and there are serious questions whether America has the social and cultural resilience to survive and thrive. This manuscript outlines a path towards not just survival but Thrivancy, guided, in part, by Gregory Bateson, and Stafford Beer.
The premise is that, as individuals, we have some amount of resilience to maintain our identity and function in the face of change. Our resilience can be increased or decreased by the number of alternative paradigms we have available to us, fewer paradigms, less resilience. Since the 1950’s, there has been a reduction in available, alternative paradigms and an increasing rate of socio-cultural change.
Every reduction in the paradigms available to the individual is a reduction in choice. A reduction in choice is a reduction in control with a parallel reduction of resilience. Without resilience, you cannot thrive in the face of change. For fifty years, there has been a dominant cultural paradigm, driving others to the margins, and slowly devolving into an ideology. All ideologies truncate resilience and preclude Thrivancy.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1, INTRODUCTION
This is a brief description of the present crisis. There is a pervasive sense of unease about the state of the Nation. The American Idea is being challenged as it has not been for the last eighty years in ways that have not been seen before.
Chapter 2, HOW DID WE GET HERE?
S&H predicted that by 2010’s, we would be entering a period of crisis predicated on generational change and culminating between 2025 and 2030. The generational crisis has been exacerbated by the development of five mutually causal drivers of socio-cultural change; COVID-19, In-Your-Face-Technology, the Lying-for-Dollars Business Model, White Supremacy, and Climate Change.
Chapter 3, WHAT IS RESILIENCY AND HOW DOES IT DEVELOP?
Resiliency is defined as the ability to respond to change in a manner that maintains identity and function. Why do we care whether individuals demonstrate resilience? So much has changed and yet we still need to make life work, take care of children, and must still interact on some level, in some way, with others.
Chapter 4, PARADIGM DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTION
There is a dominant, hierarchical, white, male, cultural paradigm that forms an umbrella over much of American culture and history. This paradigm has been legalized and socialized at an increasing pace, truncating of the rest of the resilience system.
Chapter 5, HOW DO WE CHANGE PARADIGMS TO BUILD RESILIENCE?
The question is can we rebuild American resilience to address the extraordinary rate of change coming our way? The answer is yes, we can, but we will need to undergo a massive paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts are always gradual until they aren’t.
Chapter 6, A NEW BASIS FOR CREATING NEW PARADIGMS
What is called for is a dramatic paradigm shift about how we teach and what we teach. We need to move away from a paradigm where Math is somehow different from French and different from Art or Music. Where Science is different from History and English literature. Where writing a sentence is in a different universe than skipping rope. Nature is minute and universal. Nature is physical, and not. Nature is patterned and chaotic. Humans and crabs share patterns, and don’t. The schizophrenic and the primrose are both natural, with different natures.
Chapter 7, CREATING THE RESILIENCY PARADIGM
The real power of the Natural History Paradigm becomes apparent when it is combined with the more structured Systems Paradigm. The Systems Paradigm depends on recognition of connections and patterns. The Natural History Paradigm has become an interface between the technology of computers and the beauty of Nature. Woven together, they harness the power of the computer in a humane and regenerative fashion as the computer has generated whole new ways of seeing, understanding, and describing the World. Both allow the incorporation of the Reductionist Paradigm to confirm the reality of patterns and connections. This combination is The Resiliency Paradigm.
Chapter 8, THRIVANCY EDUCATION
This chapter braids together three extant approaches to schools and schooling. The three approaches are: Outward Bound’s Expeditionary Learning, Fulghum’s All I Really Needed to Know, I learned in Kindergarten, and the Lewis and Clark Expeditionary model.
Chapter 9, THRIVANCY EDUCATION MANAGEMENT
Ashby’s Law, the First Law of Cybernetics, says that the more complex the system, the more complex the management must be. Thrivancy Education will be both complicated and complex, requiring a delicate balance of autonomy and control. Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model is the starting point, but the chapter is devoted to Evaluability Assessment and Management by Wandering Around as the basis for the requisite Trust needed to effectively manage the system.
Chapter 10, CAN THE AMERICAN IDEA SURVIVE?
This chapter is all about the good news that is happening all around us. The crisis is delayed. Gen Z is riding over the horizon and a thick wooden stake has been driven through the zombie, Trickle Down Economy. We are building from the bottom up and the middle out. Thrivancy Education can play a huge role in making the lights from the City on the Hill bright and shining.
And here is the paradox of hope: as we move beyond empty optimism and choose to live the lives we believe in, hope becomes transformed into something else entirely. It becomes stubborn, defiant courage. It becomes principled clarity. And when courageous-hearted, clear-minded people find one another, it becomes a powerful creative force for social change. K.D. Moore