Every year, I ask students to write a letter (that they won't send) to President Obama about how to be an effective leader. This is used as a lead in to discussing The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. In the prompt, I ask them to avoid personal attacks or political arguments, instead trying to focus on what leadership is.
They rarely do it right.
That's okay. It's difficult to know how to talk in concrete abstract terms (which is, in my mind, all leadership "trainings" are), and it can be extra difficult when the topic is polarizing, knee-jerking, and more complicated than others. My favorite responses are always kids who aren't politically interested/active, because they tend to answer the question more fully. They don't have political axes to grind, so they say things like, "Keep your promises" and "Keep us safe." Not the most useful of advice, perhaps, but they're 15 and that feels about right.
It is always interesting to see what things will get under kids' skin. This year, being an election year, I decided to have them write to the presidential nominees--President Obama is old hat and few, save the most die-hard conservatives, care about him much any more*--and I thought it would be fun to see what they had to say to Agent Orange and Overqualified Grandma. Only a few wrote to Senator Clinton. Most wrote to Mr. Trump. A couple wrote to both.
What was interesting, though, was that almost none of the pieces were laudatory. Some wrote parodies or satires of the piece, speaking in hyperbolic tones about the would-be accomplishments of a future President Trump. Others derided Senator Clinton for her stance on certain things, though often they had a distorted sense of her position. Some wrote to Mr. Trump and belittled his ideas, asked him why he was racist, or urged him to drop out of the race.
In other words, even our children aren't very civil in the civil discourse that allows American democracy to function.
Now, most years, there's a lot of misrepresentation of the president in this journal. One of the things I enjoy doing is pulling up Obama's track record on his promises, as "keeping promises" is often something that people value. I point out that he has over 40% of his promises kept, which almost always surprises the students. When you add in compromises, it jumps to about 65%.
This year, however, one of my students argued a "glass-half-empty" mentality, saying that a compromise is a broken promise, since the president didn't do what he said he would.
This is the saddest thing that I've seen this year. If our up coming generation views compromise as tantamount to a broken promise, the political poisons that have been coursing through our republic's veins aren't going anywhere. If it's no longer about helping the country to succeed, but instead only getting one person's (or party's) way, then what hope do we have? President Obama made overtures of bipartisanship early on, when his party was in full control of the Senate. Later on, he actually had to become conciliatory in some areas. He even had to compromise.
From the rhetoric I've heard loudest, the GOP-themed Tea Party has taken the phrase compromise and turned it into a dirty word. Bipartisanship, the politically correct concept that compromise is part of, likewise seems a rarer and rarer thing. I recognize people seem to want to say "both sides do it" as if that's an excuse, but I'm not interested in that argument. It's reductive, useless, and attempts to exculpate guilty parties. Mitch McConnell's number one stated goal was to prevent President Obama from getting any successes, and there's a big R next to his name.
This kind of thinking has, like the lead in the water of Flint, Michigan, filtered into our children. The concept of cooperation has become so toxic that the party is paramount. I asked what leadership qualities were important. One student said, "Hard work."
"Which of the two candidates works harder?" I asked.
"Donald Trump," answered the dyed-in-the-wool conservative kid. When pressed, he mentioned Trump's record of building businesses. I asked why service of decades in the government, serving as Secretary of State, and a New York Senator didn't make Senator Hillary Clinton a harder worker. He claimed she murdered people.
The fact that the student couldn't see the irony of touting an investor as a hard worker--one who makes money not through labor, but the manipulation of money--saddens me.
While I'm feeling a little discouraged by this, I'm really glad I had this conversation. It shows that our hope in the next generation isn't built upon an innate goodness that youth have (though I do believe there's something innately good in them--and all people), but instead in our ability to see, through them, the mistakes we've made and--I hope--intervene with them in time for them to course correct. History is a long game, but it's built upon small instances, small choices. I'm confident that I'm helping create a thinking populous, one that is less swayed by the letter after politicians' names and more concerned with the consequences of their positions.
---
* These kids were in elementary school when he was first elected, so their entire childhoods are with President Obama in office. It makes me wonder, considering how incredibly conservative this area is, what kinds of opinions these kids have about the presidency in general, based upon the vitriol that has been festering since '08. I hadn't thought of it before, but maybe the attempt to poison the voting public against President Obama has also--inadvertently--poisoned a rising generation against the office of the presidency. It's too early to tell, but I think there's a possibility.
They rarely do it right.
That's okay. It's difficult to know how to talk in concrete abstract terms (which is, in my mind, all leadership "trainings" are), and it can be extra difficult when the topic is polarizing, knee-jerking, and more complicated than others. My favorite responses are always kids who aren't politically interested/active, because they tend to answer the question more fully. They don't have political axes to grind, so they say things like, "Keep your promises" and "Keep us safe." Not the most useful of advice, perhaps, but they're 15 and that feels about right.
It is always interesting to see what things will get under kids' skin. This year, being an election year, I decided to have them write to the presidential nominees--President Obama is old hat and few, save the most die-hard conservatives, care about him much any more*--and I thought it would be fun to see what they had to say to Agent Orange and Overqualified Grandma. Only a few wrote to Senator Clinton. Most wrote to Mr. Trump. A couple wrote to both.
What was interesting, though, was that almost none of the pieces were laudatory. Some wrote parodies or satires of the piece, speaking in hyperbolic tones about the would-be accomplishments of a future President Trump. Others derided Senator Clinton for her stance on certain things, though often they had a distorted sense of her position. Some wrote to Mr. Trump and belittled his ideas, asked him why he was racist, or urged him to drop out of the race.
In other words, even our children aren't very civil in the civil discourse that allows American democracy to function.
Now, most years, there's a lot of misrepresentation of the president in this journal. One of the things I enjoy doing is pulling up Obama's track record on his promises, as "keeping promises" is often something that people value. I point out that he has over 40% of his promises kept, which almost always surprises the students. When you add in compromises, it jumps to about 65%.
This year, however, one of my students argued a "glass-half-empty" mentality, saying that a compromise is a broken promise, since the president didn't do what he said he would.
This is the saddest thing that I've seen this year. If our up coming generation views compromise as tantamount to a broken promise, the political poisons that have been coursing through our republic's veins aren't going anywhere. If it's no longer about helping the country to succeed, but instead only getting one person's (or party's) way, then what hope do we have? President Obama made overtures of bipartisanship early on, when his party was in full control of the Senate. Later on, he actually had to become conciliatory in some areas. He even had to compromise.
From the rhetoric I've heard loudest, the GOP-themed Tea Party has taken the phrase compromise and turned it into a dirty word. Bipartisanship, the politically correct concept that compromise is part of, likewise seems a rarer and rarer thing. I recognize people seem to want to say "both sides do it" as if that's an excuse, but I'm not interested in that argument. It's reductive, useless, and attempts to exculpate guilty parties. Mitch McConnell's number one stated goal was to prevent President Obama from getting any successes, and there's a big R next to his name.
This kind of thinking has, like the lead in the water of Flint, Michigan, filtered into our children. The concept of cooperation has become so toxic that the party is paramount. I asked what leadership qualities were important. One student said, "Hard work."
"Which of the two candidates works harder?" I asked.
"Donald Trump," answered the dyed-in-the-wool conservative kid. When pressed, he mentioned Trump's record of building businesses. I asked why service of decades in the government, serving as Secretary of State, and a New York Senator didn't make Senator Hillary Clinton a harder worker. He claimed she murdered people.
The fact that the student couldn't see the irony of touting an investor as a hard worker--one who makes money not through labor, but the manipulation of money--saddens me.
While I'm feeling a little discouraged by this, I'm really glad I had this conversation. It shows that our hope in the next generation isn't built upon an innate goodness that youth have (though I do believe there's something innately good in them--and all people), but instead in our ability to see, through them, the mistakes we've made and--I hope--intervene with them in time for them to course correct. History is a long game, but it's built upon small instances, small choices. I'm confident that I'm helping create a thinking populous, one that is less swayed by the letter after politicians' names and more concerned with the consequences of their positions.
---
* These kids were in elementary school when he was first elected, so their entire childhoods are with President Obama in office. It makes me wonder, considering how incredibly conservative this area is, what kinds of opinions these kids have about the presidency in general, based upon the vitriol that has been festering since '08. I hadn't thought of it before, but maybe the attempt to poison the voting public against President Obama has also--inadvertently--poisoned a rising generation against the office of the presidency. It's too early to tell, but I think there's a possibility.
Comments