Cairns #47
Beginning of the Long Nights, 2006

The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

Voices carry over the water further than most people realize. I was kayaking down my favorite stretch of the Sacramento River a few weeks ago when I overheard a conversation from some men fishing from a boat. This conversation sounded like knowledgeable people talking about the weakening local housing market. Because Chrysalis is looking to buy a site for the school, I listened in for some inside information. Then the conversation shifted to the war in Iraq and one of the men said, “What’s a few kids? If it keeps the economy going strong, what the hell.... Helps solve the population problem.”

That comment offended me so deeply. On the other hand, the man was at least honest about the connection between our occupation of Iraq and our economy. I was dismayed with pre-election news reports that portrayed the Iraq occupation as a negative issue for Bush but the economy as a positive issue for Bush without making any connection between the two. We pulled tens of thousands of reservists out of their jobs and sent them overseas, requiring businesses to hire others. Of course unemployment will lower. With Iraq, we are sinking hundreds of millions of dollars a day into greater debt. Of course some of it will trickle down to “fuel” the economy. Republicans would howl “big government” if Keynesian Democrats advocated massive deficit spending on this scale to boost the economy. Yet that is what this Republican congress and president have been doing. They’ve just called it the War on Terror instead to make people look another direction. I fear our nation is sliding into an economic war addiction in which war psychology blinds us to what we are financially doing to ourselves.

The flow of water and money
Partisan electoral debate leads me to articulate more deeply the very direct analogy I see between Gaian water flow and “Gaian economics. ”Fresh water is a precious gift to the land. Only a fraction of the water that is solar distilled from the salty sea makes it to land. Life husbands that gift by slowing the runoff, keeping fresh water high in the drainage as long as possible where it can more easily be recycled over and over again.

A good economy should do the same with money flow. Money is a tool that helps people prioritize their dreams and organize to achieve them—helping them work together to build something greater than individuals could achieve on their own. Money, like water, can cycle and eddy around and around. It doesn’t matter to a plant whether the water it transpires just fell from the sea or has been transpired by ten other plants and re-rained down since it came from the sea, and it doesn’t matter whether a dollar bill is brand new or old and wrinkled to softness. Money, like water, has a tendency to converge as it flows. Life has evolved ways to slow this convergence and recycle the moisture back onto the headwaters. I think of government as an invention of people that can create a similar effect with money.

Liberals are right in opposing current governmental policies that concentrate the flow of money onto the wealthy. Conservatives are likewise right in opposing governmental policies where taxes, like pavement and storm drains, take money out of the local economy and lead it far downstream (Washington) so that less is left to recycle locally. The fields suggest that the ideal solution is to recycle the money flow just as it begins to concentrate and spread it back up on the slopes. It’s confusing because money flows in two ways. The goal is not to slow the movement of money. We want money to go quickly around and around within a local economy. What we want to slow down is the rate at which the money flows convergingly downslope. We want to slow that rate down so that inflow becomes greater than outflow and the water table rises throughout all local economies.

Here is another water image that might help. If you wanted to have lots of water, far more than anyone else, then you could pave the area upslope so that all the runoff flows to you. Not only does that give you lots of water, it also depletes the water available to others which makes you comparatively even waterier. On the other hand, if your desire is for there to be more water on an absolute scale within the entire system (which creates more water for you also), then the best thing is to increase the capability of the slopes above to absorb the rain and bring forth more life to transpire and recycle the water more often.

It is a fascinating dance between convergence and recycling. A culture wants some convergence. The water should not flow evenly over every square inch. It is constructive to have economic feedback of diminished flows to horrible behavior and increased flows converging upon exemplary behavior. When we speak of water like this, we need to look beyond the amount of water one has to the vastness of the network that the water sustains. Similarly, a culture needs to look beyond the amount of money it has to the nature of the network it sustains.

Thinking about how government can help recycle money flow led me to think of the ways that teachers act like governmental “springs” with the money emerging as a salary within the local economy. Such money is distributed uniformly (every twenty kids or so) throughout the nation’s population with little directive on how the money should be spent so it is free to move in a way shaped by the local economy. However, the funding of a teacher’s work additionally enhances both the local and national economy by increasing the education level of that local economy.


Second Solution education
This title borrows a phrase I developed in my DVD, The Upward Spiral in response to the question: How does life exist in a universe shaped by the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The first solution to the question is by harvesting energy from outside of yourself, living at the expense of others. The second solution lies in the altering of flows so that possibilities accumulate.

John Taylor Gatto, one of my heroes, references an article by Jean Anyon (http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~cac/nlu/fnd504/anyon.htm) that demonstrated a correlation between a school’s socio-economic level and the style of teaching. In lower class neighborhood schools, for example, students are given rote assignments with no explanation of why they should do it other than, “You need this to pass the test.” Being a “successful” student means following the rules. Listen and repeat what the teacher says. In the upper class schools, the emphasis is on thinking for yourself, learning to shape your own education, seeking verification of validity from the world rather than the authority of the teacher, learning how to control your world.

I aspire to have Chrysalis be like an elite school, except that “elite” schools have one major fault—their elitism. I went as a student to some of the elite colleges which were filled with students from the elite prep schools. I experienced these schools as serving two overlapping audiences with two overlapping purposes. One audience is gifted students that are given, on the whole, as good an education as they are willing to receive. The second audience is children of rich families who buy a prestigious degree for a prestigious sum of money.

These two purposes reinforce one another. The first audience of talent needs the second audience’s wealth to fund the individualized, in-depth education that nourishes excellence. The second audience of wealth needs the first audience of talent to maintain the academic reputation of excellence associated with the diploma.

An important job of the elite schools is to help wealth justify and perpetuate itself. We see graduation from a prestigious school as evidence of excellence and intelligence. Creating that perception is one of the jobs of the elite schools—to bestow a label (e.g., ‘Harvard graduate’) that people associate with excellence—though, in many cases, that label is merely a mask for having a lot of money.

In order to thrive financially, these elite schools need to be perceived as creating an aura of superiority around their students. That aura, and the value placed upon it, teaches the children to perceive and engage life in terms of the first solution, a zero-sum game. Winners and losers. This view is then carried by most of the students after graduation into positions of leveraged power where they interact with and alter the world in a way that makes it seem even more like a first solution world. When that happens, this type of education fails the world in a fundamental way.

Many of these schools would dispute these results, pointing to their efforts to increase student body diversity and programs that get their students in touch with the world beyond privilege. And, in fairness, the aura of superiority is not just taught by the schools. Our culture infuses this lesson upon these schools. Parents strive for their child’s admittance into these schools because that is seen as the established path to success. Therefore, the lesson is whispered for years before a student even enters these schools. Admittance is one of the strongest lessons of them all. “Only a few will be admitted. Your success depends on being one of them.” The world divides us into winners and losers—the first solution.

At the same time this is happening, our public education is being shaped by high-stakes standardized testing. The emphasis on test scores is pushing more and more teaching towards what Anyon would describe as lower class education. “Learn to repeat what the teacher says because that is what we need you to do.” The already-wealthy are taught how to control the world and every one else is taught to “do what you are told” in a Mengeleian ripping apart of our culture into a vast lower class and an upper class with little in between.

What I am exploring at Chrysalis is Second Solution education. An elite education without the elitism. An education that is freely available to any who choose it so it is free from that aura/arrogance arrogant aura of superiority over others. From that strong foundation, a different kind of education can be developed where we learn to see the world in terms of flows and our lives as containing the power to alter those flows and the universe as full of still unexplored, unknown possibilities.
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The New York Times just published an article about “semester schools,” schools that offer a semester-long program that puts high school students in a natural setting, working together as a community, with high academic expectations. The schools cost about $17,000 for the semester and are filled almost exclusively with rich kids from expensive private high schools. The article was extolling the virtues of programs like this; how they expand one’s character and put one in contact with the real world including your fellow students. I have written about some of these virtues in Cairns because this is what we are trying to do at Chrysalis. The difference, however, is that instead of one semester, we are trying to offer a nine-year program. Instead of high school students who have already mastered the academic fundamentals, we are working with K—8th grade and including teaching of the fundamentals. Instead of the $17,000 a semester winnowing of students down to those of “privilege,” we are working with any family interested in our approach. (Currently, 55% of our students are eligible for the free or reduced-price lunch program.) Instead of providing an experience for 30 students a semester with an annual budget of around a million dollars, we are providing the experience for 100 students with an annual budget of around six hundred thousand dollars.

Chrysalis Update
It would be handy to be receiving $17,000 per student semester. Chrysalis is surviving in two, inadequate rented facilities but at great cost in terms of staff time and energy. Families feel the stress and we all feel how the inadequate facilities have bent the program away from our vision. We fervently hope to have a unified, adequate facility by next year but it’s hard because the housing boom hit Redding very hard and sent real estate prices through the roof. However, we are trying to line up some grants and loans and hopefully I’ll be able to report some progress in the next Cairns.

© 2006, Paul Krafel, 18080 Brincat Manor, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609

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