Categories
asides

Trolling for Truth on Social Media

From Trolling for Truth on Social Media:

Redesigning social media for timely, local, relevant and authoritative information requires a commitment to design justice, which sees technology not as a neutral tool but as a means for building the worlds we want.

Categories
education

Democratizing Justice in the Schools

My school has a judicial committee comprised entirely of students (and advised by a staff member). The judicial committee is charged with enforcing the rules of the school. It acts upon reports submitted by both staff and students, which allows students to settle their differences without the interference of a staff member (outside of the advisor, who doesn’t get a vote). The rules of the school, in their turn, have been determined by a congress comprised of both staff and students, with each member of the school receiving an equal vote, regardless of age, grade, or employment status.

In theory, this sounds great, but I fear that somewhere along the line, the adults in this relationship made a mistake.

I am a radical democratist: I put my faith in other people. I believe that all people have it within them to act faithfully and good, and that what people need more than almost anything else is to be heard. People who have a voice are people who want a choice, and putting people together in a room and asking them to be faithful and good is the best way to lay all of the available choices on the table.

When implementing our ideal judicial system at the school, us adults made (and continue to make) a mistake. While we allow the students to adjudicate issues related to minor annoyances, we shield them from the most serious issues facing our community. When there is a serious infraction against the community in our school, we don’t ask our students to deal with it themselves (advised by a staff member, of course); instead, we take it upon ourselves, imagining the students to be too delicate to handle any of our community’s “real” problems.

A case in point. At least once or twice a year, we have to evacuate a building because a student’s behavior threatens to turn violent. When this happens, the offending student’s consequences are determined by a team of staff members, and the students are asked to just go on their merry way.

Except of course, they don’t. They internalize the notion that their school is a place where violence can always happen, and that when it does, it will be dealt with by someone else, and that despite their own concerns and interests, no one will ever consider their ideas or opinions on the matter.

If that isn’t horrible training for life in a democratic society, then I don’t know what is.

Imagine a school where even the biggest issues are brought to the students to deal with, not in terms of a shame circle or anything like that, but in terms of [restorative justice](https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/restorative-justice-overview/), which asks offenders to repair their harm to the victim and to the community. Schools should not hide a whole level of learning and wisdom from their students, one that forces them to face their community’s real situations and to work them through together.

A challenge to this approach comes from the concept of privacy. At what point does an individual’s privacy outweigh the loss of the community’s ability to represent itself in all things? Consider a case where a student reports an unwanted sexual advance made by another student in the form of a digital photo sent via text (e.g., the unrequested sending of a “dick pic”). In this example, the recipient of the photo does not feel comfortable addressing the problem alone, and so seeks out a teacher for help.

Should the teacher encourage the recipient to “write up” the offender, forcing the latter to face (at the very least) a small panel of their peers? Or should the teacher take it upon themself to address the problem (in whatever way that might be), thereby saving both the recipient and the offender from having to talk about the issue in front of their peers?

If the latter, doesn’t the teacher 1) encourage the spread of rumors, and 2) invite the students to deal out justice on their own terms, with no guidance from the wisdom of our entire species’ history of justice systems (as understood by the school’s Congress)?

There is a question of legal privacy as well, but do accused students have the right to prevent their peers from determining the right course of action? What if every student attending the school (and every guardian representing them) signed off on a policy saying that all who are accused should expect to face a jury of their peers?

In the case of the “dick pic,” both the offender and the recipient would have to face a small panel composed of three students selected at random from a congress of their peers (serving on the panel is akin to jury duty). The recipient would state their case; the accused would declare themselves guilty or not guilty, and the panel would take it from there (again, in terms of restorative justice).

The mistake we continue to make is that, for all of the real issues, we restrict the judicial panel to a team of staff members and all of the students know it…just as they know how to tell us what we want to hear. How much more powerful would it be if every offender had to face their victims, recognize their offenses, and work to restore justice to the community?

We’re sometimes too afraid of our students, too afraid of young people in general, not trusting them to act faithfully and good. But if we don’t teach them to face their problems head on, in all of their complex reality, then what kind of adults are we teaching them to be?

Future generations are going to be here long after us adults are gone. If we want to continue our species’ long journey out of the wild anarchy of nature, we better make sure our kids know how to act faithfully in the name of justice, and to do so regardless of the complexity of the issue. Not every adult (and not every student) in my school will agree with me, but I think it’s a debate worth having.

Categories
politics

One Meaning of Liberalism

I have a reputation among my friends and family as a rather aggressive liberal. I don’t deny that reputation, but I also don’t wholly accept it. As I recently explained to a family member, I try not to bring up politics in a conversation, but if someone else brings it up, I’m am more than willing to join in.

To me, however, politics does not mean partisanship. I am not a registered member of either of the major parties: I am not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican. I’m a registered member of the Vermont Progressive Party, the most successful third party in the United States. “Founded by the activists who helped to elect Bernie Sanders as the Mayor of Burlington” in the early 1980s, the Vermont Progressive Party now boasts 10 local officials throughout the towns and cities of Vermont, three state senators, eight state representatives, and two statewide officeholders (Vermont’s Auditor of Accounts and Vermont’s Lieutenant Governor).

So when it comes to talking about national politics (which is usually what I’m talking about with people), I don’t have a dog in the partisan fight.

While I’m not a Democrat or Republican, I am, in fact, a liberal. But when you take away the context of the national parties, the question becomes: what does it mean to be liberal?

The concepts that ring out the most are social justice, economic justice, a rigorous commitment to the facts, and a willingness to engage with the complexity of historic and systemic context.

Justice is at the heart of being a liberal. The pre-emininent philosopher on the topic, John Rawls, lays out two principles of justice: first, that there must be “equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties,” and second, that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage and attached to positions and offices open to all.”

The first principle means that everyone in the society has the same rights and obligations, regardless of who they are or where they come from. The second means that any difference in those rights or obligations must be acceptable and open to all; for example, if the President of the United States gets to have the pomp of the Marine Corps Band playing a song every time he walks into a room, it’s because we want to have the best of the best take that position and offering such pomp is one of the ways we try to entice them, and that’s okay, provided that the office is open to everyone.

In the context of social justice, it comes down to what Rawls famously calls the “veil of ignorance,” where you are asked to construct a just society of which you will be a permanent member without knowing anything about yourself — your race, gender, sexuality, ethnic background, intelligence level, physical ability, vigor, wealth, etc. In such a situation, you would probably design a society that is as fair as possible, since there is a reasonable chance that you would be among the least advantaged members of that society.

In practical terms, that means looking at today’s social and economic issues as if you were a member of the disadvantaged class. If you are a White person, you must imagine our criminal justice system as if you were a Black or Latino person. If you have a place to securely lay your head at night, you must imagine the nighttime worries of a homeless person. If you are a member of the financial services or advanced technology industries, you must imagine the depression of someone whose entire economic life has revolved around a coal mine. If you can comfortably sustain a medical emergency in your family, you must imagine the strain of a hospital visit for someone who doesn’t have health insurance. If you are free from the crippling hunger of addiction, you must imagine what it feels like to be so driven to score your next fix that you’re willing to demolish your closest personal relationships, including those with your children. If you can walk into a public restroom without any thought about which door is right for you, you must imagine the difficulty of someone who sees the male or female symbol as not representing their lived reality.

In such situations, where you are among the underprivileged, how would you design your society? Would you design a dog-eat-dog system, or would you design a society that was as fair as possible for everyone involved? Any reasonable person would attempt the latter.

When a situation arises — the protests at Standing Rock, for example, or Justice Gorsuch’s case of the frozen trucker, for another —  liberals attempt to imagine the viewpoint of the underprivileged member(s) of the conflict and develop their stances accordingly.

However, liberalism is not as simple as rooting for the underdog because along with social and economic justice, there is also a rigorous commitment to the facts and a willingness to engage with the historic and systemic context. Without these two elements, you’d have a knee-jerk liberalism that refuses to acknowledge any reality outside of its own.

I strive to not be a knee-jerk liberal, and whatever success I have is a function of my dedication to education, edification, and engagement. I seek out alternative viewpoints, try to read as widely and as deeply as possible, and focus as much as I’m able on questions surrounding the right and the good, knowing that there are no easy solutions to any of the conflicts facing  societies today.

There is no easy solution to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. No easy solution to the war-mongering North Korean dictatorship. No easy solution to the Syrian civil war. No easy solution to the ramifications of a globalized economy. No easy solution to the economy’s dependency on oil. No easy solution to America’s withdrawal from imperial obligations. No easy solution to the clash of liberal Western democracies with fundamentalist ideologies. No easy solution to technology’s conquering force. No easy solution to the problems facing public education. No easy solution to gun control. Etc. Etc.

But the liberalism I aspire to accepts this complexity and says that the only way forward to a better society lies in grappling with issues in a reasonable and enlightened manner, acknowledging grievances, accepting historic realities, and finding, through democratic conversations and a willingness to compromise (not on principle, perhaps, but in fact), solutions that are acceptable to all.

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world be as one.”