Category Archives: Service

COVENANTS AND CULTURAL INTERPRETATIONS: THE SOUL OF ALLEGIANCES GIVEN AND KEPT

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A few days ago I heard the word covenant used as how Christians should align ourselves with the Word of God, as depicted in the Bible and translated into action within a church. Like many of our English words, covenant comes from the Latin language, meaning coming together. An agreement, contract, or promise. Which includes a list of stipulations, privileges, and responsibilities.

At one time I considered becoming a lawyer. I passed the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and received acceptance letters from two universities. After much consideration and conversation with my wife, I decided to extinguish that initial interest. Instead, I remained in the field of education and eventually became a university professor responsible for preparing teachers and school administrators.

My reasons for that decision were complicated but never regretted.

The legal profession is essential in our society, because its practitioners can negotiate the intricacies of binding covenants. They untangle vague understandings and language usage. Lawyers are both admired and disliked for their ability, depending on how well they defend or advocate points-of-view. Depending on who feels supported by their actions and who does not.

They can come across as good guys standing up to those who would diminish or cheat us common folk. Or as mouthpieces with dubious reputations who successfully defend guilty parties with enough money to pay for skillful advocacy. 

They can find ways to prove inaccuracies of covenants such as insurance contracts. Or laws so poorly worded or executed they are depicted as unfair or favorable only to those who gain the advantage. Politics in our democracy depends on lawyers. Or those who think like them. To write our laws and support citizens living under them.

During the early years of my education career, I served as the representative and advisor for teachers who held grievances against school district policies or practices. No compensation was given to me, but it felt good to win. Which I did every time.

But that experience convinced me to rescind my law school applications. I learned how to win, using strategies for clients who may not have deserved to win. To succeed through intellectual manipulation and strategic maneuvering.

But a deeper reason for my disenchantment involved the pervasive existence of ignorance. The unwillingness to accept opportunities to be fully engaged with the soul of covenants. By soul of covenants, I refer to righteousness described by God. Applied as worldly actions that make us one with a holy universe.

Compromise and accommodation are outcomes Christians have long accepted. But they become the soul of covenants only when they become more of who we are than simply what we accept or do.

Our doctrines, often based on Holy Scripture, can be manipulated to align with contemporary attitudes. People who think like lawyers create unjust conditions. They find scriptural passages that support those conditions and the beliefs on which they are created. People accommodate themselves to those conditions and beliefs, and even stand up for them against opponents.

This blog post is being written in a place similar to where I grew up. The sun emerges over the Organ Mountains to the east, revealing a desert landscape like places I once hiked and revered. Similar to the terrain Christ once walked as he fulfilled his earthly ministry. A ministry founded on principles of reverence for the diversity of earth’s features and its living inhabitants. For ALL the human beings allowed to live on this globe. Under a free will that gives us the opportunity to search for purpose. For ways we can better express unconditional love for each other.

His kind of service was rejected by many. By those with enough power to disparage his teachings and attempt to remove his physical existence. They failed.

But their kind keep re-emerging in us today. Sometimes in the form of political or military dictatorships. Sometimes in the form of those with their own self-serving goals. Those who use their charisma, money, and/or ability to encourage others toward their kinds of aspiration. Using legalisms that justify their own self-serving ends yet sound logical and reasonable in the context of social order. Using fear as a justification for violence. Or to build an extreme loyalty to particular cultural beliefs.

Legalisms and fear can appear in the context of religious belief. No one disputes the value of the Ten Commandments as a guide for living, although they are widely ignored or tempered by cultural loyalties and compromises.

Jesus acknowledged their value as the basis for a behavioral covenant. But in his physical life and today he tells us we must seek the soul of our covenants. To know who we are, as people who genuinely love each other and use that commitment to serve. Even when that kind of service is declared unwanted or unrealistic. Or, in Jesus’ days, dangerous on many levels. Too inclusive. Too upsetting to social order and the economy. Too much a threat to existing laws and cultural mores.

This time in the desert is a good opportunity for me to reflect on how well my allegiances have been given and kept. How well the soul of my covenant has been managed in my life. Even when that kind of service was rejected or ignored.

©2023 Stu Ervay – All Rights Reserved

LEADERSHIP: A MULTIDIMINSIONAL KIND OF SERVICE

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As an elementary school student, I was fascinated with the subject of leadership. Like many boys, I read books about heroic leaders in history. Became absorbed by the feats of fictitious leaders in stories and movies. All courageous men putting themselves in harm’s way to save the helpless and weak. Invariably coming out on top and riding off victoriously into the sunset. With their enemies properly captured, incarcerated, or dead.

What were their motives? Not money, increased respect, or higher placement on the social scale. Famous military leaders were typically depicted as selfless heroes more interested in accomplishing their patriotic duty than moving up in rank or attaining a lofty status.

Selfless leaders like those depicted were invariably problem solvers. Wily strategists more than good at the fast draw, quick with their fists, or skilled at the use of war machines. Airplane pilots revered because of their maneuvering ability. But in the context of being better than the opposing pilots. And leading their units in successfully accomplishing a larger mission.

The logical transference of my interest was involvement in sports. But I was a skinny kid with bad eyes, compounded by visual depth perception issues. I was pretty good at track and field, and some boyhood diversions like marbles or mumblety-peg,  pocketknives flipped toward the ground and sticking upright. Circles drawn in Arizona’s caliche-caked earth and divided by a single line into two parts. The objective: slice your opponent’s “territory” into increasingly smaller units, until what was left was smaller than a shoe.

But even something as innocuous as playtime competitive diversions, reinforced by books and movies about heroes, taught me that “smart” almost always trumps “tough.” Effective leadership is almost always based on the quality of insight into human nature and the challenges encountered.

My reading of history in the areas of military, exploratory, or political achievements taught me that victory is usually achieved by creative thinking and action. Doing something the opponent does not expect and could not counter.

Leadership also included a willingness to take reasoned risks. Acknowledging the chance of making a mistake. But believing in oneself. Accepting the adage “failure is not an option” as more probable than just possible.

Non-Competitive Leadership

A myth places boys as gravitating toward a competitive life. Woven into our male DNA, just as females are “supposed to” be inclined toward cooperative behaviors. Stereotypical conclusions may work in movies and literary works of fiction. But they are much too simplistic and ineffective in real life.

Over the years I discovered real leadership is much different than management or administration. Nor is it based on bravado and a macho superiority.

Leadership is a powerful mix:

  • intelligence
  • willingness to learn
  • openness to the opinions of subordinates or colleagues
  • creative ingenuity
  • flexibility
  • the determination to find and use solutions to problems.

Real leadership is most closely related to the same qualities our best teachers possess. Like Jesus, they urge their followers to think deeply. Inspire them to find talents they did not know they had. Such leaders compliment with a demonstration of confidence. Not by artificial forms of positive reinforcement such as continuously saying “Good job!”

Demonstrating confidence takes respect and perceptiveness. Treating the subordinate or student in ways that acknowledge their existing and evident strengths as a starting point.

Check out these examples:

I’ve been impressed by your ability to work effectively with computers and other technical devices. You intuitively solve problems in a step-by-step way, as our best American leaders did when facing serious dilemmas. Lincoln used the kind of skill you have with tech in isolating problems. And working with others in finding and refining solutions. Step by step, little by little. What are the differences between solving technical problems and working with human beings with different opinions? How could you prove to a future employer you can do more than interact with a computer and technological challenges, by being part of a problem-solving team?

In this company all employees are asked to think as creatively as possible. Creativity in an organization is not like composing music or painting a beautiful picture. It starts with hypothesis development, the ability to make good educational guesses as to what a researcher will later find out. Not test-tube research, but the kind of quest that results in possible answers based on what we read, hear, or intuitively know. You do that well with sensitivity to what is happening around you. Like writing a one sentence “cause and effect” hypothesis. Something like “Worker efficiency, productivity, and creativity will measurably improve if they meet in person one hour each day to discuss specific ways communication can be improved without the use of technical interfaces.” 

Leadership as in the examples is not indoctrination, browbeating, intimidating challenges, or a demonstration of how someone with a superior intellect or organizational rank forces compliance via specific assessment strategies.

Jesus never acted that way. Rather, he used metaphorical analogies (parables) to make his followers think in concrete terms. Stories that touched on the ability of his disciples and others to see logic in God’s will— how He wanted human beings to relate to each other. And to Him.

©2023 Stu Ervay – All Rights Reserved

SERVICE OVERCOMES THE CONFINING OF CREATIVE THOUGHT

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Scholarship is not an enterprise limited to just one dimension. Or one discipline. That is why education has incorporated multiple fields of study for centuries. Included in the curriculum as distinct fields, overlapping only when one function is required as a tool to make other domains work. Such as the use of mathematics in the application of science and technology. Or the use of language in the study of history. Or the pairing of music and graphic arts. 

Who is to say that one subject is most important, or that a certain academic discipline is more indicative of human intelligence than any other? In like fashion, who is to say that creative thinking and acting are sparked by curiosity only within a specific intellectual pursuit?

Academic or intellectual snobbishness distorts creative thinking. It confines the human brain within categories or regions that exclude various possibilities, especially those that benefit from multivariate perspectives.

Possibly the most egregious example of that way of thinking was Nineteenth Century medicine, a field powerfully dominated by science and statistical analysis. It retarded the quality of human life for decades. Data and conclusions drawn by those declared to be especially sophisticated and learned superseded the “what if” of intellectual meandering to the point of peril.

Many horrible diseases and epidemics were not overcome until some courageous practitioner risked his or her professional career to try something previously unheard of. Something the sophisticates believed to be voodoo science or religious hocus pocus.   

Hypotheses are starting points for further research but were for years reduced to activities considered measurable in ways discernable only in concrete data. Which makes sense to those who believe in safeguards and the protection of professional credibility. And makes sense to me up to a point, the overdependence on statistical analysis.

Reasoned creativity is an important aspect of human life. The kind of creativity rooted in qualitative thinking and acting. The “what if” factor rooted in logic surrounded by mysteries as big and omnipresent as the universe in which earth is only a small and insignificant part.

Reasoned creativity is also relational. Our ideas and “what ifs” are never confined to one person’s brain or life experiences. Existence on this planet involves thousands of interdependent functions. Without them, the world would be devoid of anything more than rock.

My ideas are never born in one cell of my brain, or even thousands of cells. My ideas come from interactions with other human beings. A wide variety of experiences that become a conglomeration of viewpoints and perspectives.

Technical Creativity is Not Enough

In recent decades we have been asked to believe that creative thinking is most essential in the technical fields, through a plethora of amazing machines and other devices. Devices that entertain us, support the vehicles that move us from place to place, or make our homes safer and more convenient.

Our schools and universities are refashioning their academic programs to upgrade and expand majors in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). No criticism there. Simply a commentary on what we value most in our society. Teachers and professors in the liberal and fine arts are either replaced or allowed to retire without filling the position with someone else.

Why do these trends matter? Because the language of creative thought is being constricted. Diminished to the point of excluding matters associated with ways of being and living. The kind of cognitive and emotional expansiveness influenced by great literature and spiritual influencers.

Pushed aside are Greek literature and philosophy, ancient poems like Beowulf, and other forms of literature from various cultures. All of them once an essential part of anyone’s education.

Language is now technically descriptive more than thought-provoking. Constructed in ways people who have nothing more than a fourth-grade education can understand it.

Much of today’s religious writing, with some remarkable exceptions, tends toward maxims based on right and wrong thinking and acting. Absolute and eternal-sounding directives. Technically reasonable in the sense of practical applications to everyday life.

Secular admonitions that correspond to absolutism overlap such theological approaches to learning. Allowing people to seek control of our lives. To use sound bites and words with alarming overtones to convince us their solutions to problems or controversial circumstances are immutable. 

Jesus Christ: Creative Thinker and Advocate

Jesus, Son of God, and the heavenly representative of God’s will for us, came among us to explain that our existence is dependent on more than following patriarchal rules of behavior and worship.

Jesus was God’s service to humanity.

His message from his father and our God turned civilization upside down. Making an abstract condition called love more important than any other driving force in our lives.

While sounding innocuous to modern people, Jesus’ message from God our creator to the residents of Judea and their earthbound rulers was threatening. Even dangerous. Unconditional love as the basis for all relationships violated good political and military order. Tested belief systems of those who appointed themselves representatives of faith in the Almighty. It broke down established hierarchies by creating an aura of acceptance. A bitter pill for those with money, property, and power.

Not much has changed in today’s world. Rejecting that creative message Jesus brought from God continues to present an extremely detrimental impact on human life. For those of us who believe that unconditional love, as the root of Christian faith, must ourselves find creative ways to reinstate or reinvigorate Christ’s major principle. For ourselves. For each other.

Not through technical tinkering but through finding and using better ways to communicate with those we care for now. For those we want to care for in the larger scope of things. Through our actions and our words. Through enlarging the idea and practice of love, as Jesus taught us to do.

To define “church” as both a place to worship and a repository of meaningful exploration. As both a place to reinforce our faith and a source of ideas that stimulate people in our larger community toward a clearer understanding of how unconditional love makes a difference. In ourselves as human beings. In our institutions such as schools and businesses. In our neighborhoods, both proximate and beyond.

©2022 Stu Ervay – All Rights Reserved

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP AND SERVICE

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The word “fellowship” is a broadening of the word “relationship.” One that symbolizes purpose based on convictions and intentions supported by determination. Such as a determination to serve others in a positive way, a way that changes things for the better.

A relationship can be any kind of undefined connection between one or more people or activities. It can be familial or intensely personal. Or merely a friendly connection. It can run the gamut from acquaintanceship to romantic intensity.

Even matching a task with a tool is relational, as is linking a job with a person.

The way “relationship” is used in a sentence is important. “They have a relationship” can mean one thing. “They are in a relationship” means something entirely different.

I like to use  “relationship” as a way of thinking and behaving, associated with philosophical and emotional depth. More like “fellowship.”

The word “fellowship” has social overtones. But it also incorporates something almost metaphysical. An intertwining of many kinds of somewhat more esoteric relationships. Ranging from incidental to scholastic, from introspection to spiritual awareness.

A relationship can be casual and temporary. A fellowship implies something more complex and permanent with an aura of purposefulness surrounding it. One that transcends a mere connection of human beings at a superficial social level.  

Teams are Fellowships with a Purpose

The word team is usually associated with sports or any activity with the goal of winning or succeeding in some competitive setting. In the military I was often asked to serve in a combat team, usually consisting of a combination of infantry and vehicles. Members of a team have specific assignments, as in sports when someone plays a “position.” The same is true in the military or even a business combination of some kind.

Teams are units designed to combine people for the purpose of accomplishing a mission, the goal only a group of people can achieve. Team members are trained to work together in the context of accomplishing the team’s intentions. Sometimes, especially in team sports, psychology is necessary to make the team cohere enough to meet the mission.

Because dysfunctional teams will certainly lose.

Teams are fellowships with outward facing goals. Serving their members only to the extent they fulfill their assigned roles. And win their games.

Cliques are Indulgent Fellowships

Other fellowships can be more like fraternities or sororities, designed as cliques. One is accepted while others are excluded. Acceptance and social interactions based on little more than appearances and demonstrations of behaviors that seem to fit in. Those organizations may construct purposeful functions over time, but the foundation of their existence is within a manufactured revelry and artificial sense of belonging.

Service is the Core of Meaningful Fellowship

Teams and cliques become fellowships when relationships are involved. They provide a service in terms of game winning or social inclusion. However, in the context of advancing the quality of human life, neither are especially meaningful.

Games create diversions. Social groups reinforce status or expand/extend acquaintances over time.

Many might disagree with those definitions, the meaning behind them, or the importance they do and should have in human lives. I understand that.

But for me a meaningful fellowship has a purpose that transcends the ordinary and possesses a level of importance much bigger than our individual lives. That uplifting purpose gives a significance that is inspiring and perhaps a piece of history. An influence on others after our lives end.

My varied experiences as a member of a fellowship includes a 14-day trip through the canyons of the Colorado River with boys about my age. A difficult yet life-affirming venture involving challenging tasks we met and circumstances we overcame together. 168 miles in a rugged wilderness and on a raging river, now mostly covered with Lake Powell.

A few years later the fellowship consisted of trainees in Army basic training, the rigors of ROTC camp, and advanced forms of military challenges. Then serving as a commissioned officer with men involved in the preparation for war, depending on them as much as they depended on me.

Later fellowships involved school faculties, graduate studies, and overcoming the rigors associated with meeting requirements for a doctorate. Then university program building.

My family and its associations became a fellowship with meaning, as did the creation of a service organization for public schools: https://cliweb.org/. People came together to achieve common goals. Worked hard to find solutions to significant problems, day after day.

Fellowship as Discipleship

The Disciples that traveled and worked with Jesus Christ became a fellowship. Christians serve in various ways through different kinds of organizations: communities, orders, denominations, missionary endeavors, and crusades. People who gave away their possessions like the Apostles. Sacrificed their human desires and natural impulses to focus their attention on serving their Lord and Master.

Such religious fellowships are found everywhere, in every corner of the earth, among any who share strong beliefs and convictions. Not necessarily limited to Christianity.

The dark side of fellowship becomes an evil force that parade as people of faith in their own brand of political or devotional dogma. It raised its ugly head throughout history, becoming strong enough during the 20th Century to kill millions. And it is all too alive and well today.

On balance, I believe human fellowship to be a good thing. With an enlightened kind of procedural discipline and deep thought thrown into the mix. With the control of unfettered mass media used to pander to those with questionable or even evil intentions.

No doubt development of radio in the early 20th Century contributed greatly to the expansion of Nazism, Fascism, and dictatorial forms of Communism. Just as it did for oddball belief systems and promotion of foolish medical cures in the United States. Today, social media opens the door to online fellowships that may destroy logical thinking and mental health.

Positive forms of fellowship, such as those created by Jesus in the formation of his Apostles, are disciplined but not controlling. Educational in the sense they promote deep thinking and the formation of creative beliefs and actions. It was no accident that Jesus taught through parables, not admonitions or declarations of unquestioned truisms.

Based on that model for fellowship, we become individually and collectively better through dialogue and stimulation of logical thought. Good fellowship is a means to become individually better, thereby able to contribute back to the larger group insights not previously considered.

Like God’s nature on earth, a kind of yin and yang for the survival of everything. Without bees, no flowers.

Which makes interconnectivity the basis of the universe and our lives within it. Which makes true and interconnected fellowship the foundation for meaning and purpose. For our lives in God’s world.

©2022 Stu Ervay – All Rights Reserved

SERVILISM

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Servilism is service related to slavery.

It’s when persons providing service are required to comply or be subservient because of a designated station in life. As in a caste system or society in which certain types of human beings are treated as inferior.

Less intelligent or intuitive. Deficient in character or morals. Born for menial jobs that serve the needs and desires of their “betters.” Skin color, physical features or propensities, assumed inferior intelligence, cultural affiliations, stereotypical demeanors, and other characteristics considered abnormal. Creatures to be servile and meritorious only in the context of how well they give of their limited talents to those born more fortunate.

Even today, we human beings who consider ourselves a dominant tribe or culture attempt to eradicate or separate another one considered inferior or threatening. As seen in the Russian conflict with Ukraine. As in the unrelenting diminishment of Jewish people and others tied to historical or theological categories not aligned with mainstream thinking.

As belief in a supreme being grew prevalent throughout the centuries, biases toward those considered inferior were modified to fit religious concepts of right and wrong. Derived from the acceptance that human beings are more alike than different. That other races and cultures are not threats, but merely distinct from one another in superficial ways.

Religiously managed methods of exercising superiority have more to do with the responsibility of the dominant class of human to take care of the inferior classes. Or to improve them in ways more like the superior cultures behave, believe, or even appear.

To accept the responsibility Rudyard Kipling titled “the white man’s burden.” A mantra some even applied to the biological source of all humans. That women are to be cared for as procreators and nurturers of offspring, to serve their families and male rulers with deference as providers of their sustenance.

Many people accepted servitude as a natural state. The slavery culture that developed in the United Kingdom and United States eventually used the “white man’s burden” admonition, violated often by unscrupulous and immoral members of a commercial class. But even among venal overseers and masters, human beings classified as “property” needed to be cared for to maintain their value as workers or commodities in the marketplace.

Women, the biological source of all humanity, were excluded in the participatory and decision-making body of the times. They were restricted from working in so-called male occupations and leadership roles, including governments. Not because they were considered an inferior species, but because their God-given role was designed to concentrate on conceiving, delivering, and nurturing children. And maintaining the families in which they were raised. Which included service to the father of those children, configured any way the man considered appropriate.

Servilism is Alive and Well Today

This negative view of service still endures today—a form of societal servilism. A kind of service not entirely voluntary. Or voluntary only in a constricted sense.

The three main economic systems are capitalism, socialism, and communism. Capitalism and socialism are typically associated with representative government. Communism is linked to a more dictatorial form of decision-making.

All these societies incorporate some kind of class system in which a majority of citizens perform essential services in the marketplace, agencies, institutions, or organizations.

Compensation is always a condition associated with servilism. Even slaves, as property, had to be fed, housed, and medically cared for. Today, when classic slavery is deemed a criminal act like human trafficking, ordinary people are servilely compensated for services they provide through minimum forms of monetary compensation.

Monetary compensation varies depending on what society or the employer considers appropriate in terms of education, preparation, skills, and nature of the work involved. A major factor determines the extent to which the service of an employee or provider is considered valuable.

So, the value of a service is dictated by those who control the source of money: owners, managers, bureaucrats, boards, or other elected or appointed decision-makers. And those individuals and groups are greatly influenced by societal beliefs about value.

They are also influenced by the availability of resources to pay employees, and attitudes of society about the importance of the jobs being compensated. Capitalistic societies equate compensation with how critical the work is considered in terms of profits made by the commercial organization. In both capitalistic and socialistic societies, those employed by tax supported agencies or entities that fulfill a critical need are usually paid wages commensurate with their education and the extent to which candidates are available to fill those jobs.

The small percentage of those who have exceptional entertainment or athletic skills often attract large financial rewards during the time they are lauded and maintain the talent for which they are recognized.

Socialistic economies differ somewhat since their representative governments equalize wealth and subsistence levels through tax equalization and income distribution formulas. Designed to avert both extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

Capitalistic countries believe that such a balanced policy retards economic growth, since less money is available for research, investment, and incentives. They accept a huge disparity in quality of life, believing that people work best when they are inspired and capable of achieving economic goals that are enticements to ever greater accomplishment.

Capitalistic societies believe the general education and welfare of children, while important, are familial obligations. General investments in children (such as their schooling) should be limited to sustaining and continuously invigorating the economy. The economy first. Everyone’s fulfilled life —a distant second.

Voluntary Service of the Kind Provided by Christ

Can we conclude that voluntary service is offered only when the contributor is otherwise able to live at the subsistence level or above?

Jesus Christ was not a slave. But he lived in a society considered subservient by its military and political masters—the Romans. And Jewish classes like the Pharisees who believed themselves superior to other Jewish sects. They created laws and rules of behavior that dominated their own race and culture, making them cohorts of the Roman occupiers.

By trade, Jesus was a craftsman, but left that trade to spread his ministry. Nothing biblical suggests financial support from his family. What does show up as support comes from friends and followers, usually in the form of housing and food. Specific people appear as capable of providing tangible as well as spiritual support, specifically men like Arimathea and Nicodemus. Possibly even Lazarus and his sister, Martha. Other women also supported Jesus, particularly Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna (see Luke 8).

Jesus, the Son of God, lived as a human being with the same creature and emotional needs we have. Unlike me and millions like me, he did not have a satisfactory retirement income. Nor did he have an organizational sponsor or a charitable system that donated much to his ministry. He went out alone and convinced other key individuals about who he was and the importance of his message from God.

Spreading the message was different in Jesus’ era. No TV, internet, postal service, radio, public address systems, or phone. Just a man who walked and interacted with others along the way. Done voluntarily because those with whom he interacted helped materially, emotionally, and spiritually.

That voluntary service worked for Jesus because communities were smaller and more interactive than most are today. People shopped outdoors in the markets or conducted their trades in the fields or open-air structures.

Jesus was able to influence others because his speech and demeanor were characteristic of a rabbi or knowledgeable teacher. In that era such a wise and learned person was recognized by reputation, instead of formal academic study and the certification necessary today.

The other reason Jesus was accepted as a volunteer rabbi is because people longed to hear the message he articulately preached. That love and mutual support were at the center of life’s purpose. Not an existence based on submissively serving dominate cultures such as the Romans and Philistines.

Servilism in the Twenty-first Century

Today’s society, especially in the United States, is greatly influenced by the philosophy of servilism. Instead of Roman or Philistine rulers dominating our lives, commercial and political influencers tell us our life’s purpose is to serve their material and emotional wants and needs. As well as their beliefs, convictions, and biases. As hourly employees and professional providers of medical care, educational growth, oversight of property, and protection from life’s hazards.

Monetary compensation for those services varies depending on how much workers are valued by those who control our financial universe. And how much human beings themselves are valued.

As in ancient times, those providing ruler-defined service today are asked to accept life’s meaning and purpose through assigned or available endeavors. Employment in jobs or other forms of legal activities must generate income. Entrepreneurial work in agriculture, manufacturing, or a commercial activity. Fulfillment of governmental responsibilities.

If such purposes are insufficiently satisfying in the minds of those serving, they are given diversions. The Romans excelled at providing exciting games and other forms of entertainment. Just as we do. Diversions with no lasting meaning. Just momentarily significant in the minds of recipients.

Jesus’ life as defined by God, his father, revolved around a single purpose. He found ways to provide service that meant something in a universal and eternal setting. Everlasting. Life enriching for everyone.

Conversely, a purposeful life in the Twenty-first Century is usually defined as something tangible. Relatable. Job descriptions or family responsibilities.  Scholarly pursuits. Hobbies and travel. Activities and involvements. Relationships and interests. Interactions with things, items produced, or nurtured. Constructing and caring for.

What is often missing is a sense of purpose, the kind Jesus held. One in which voluntary service to others absorbs the persona. Becoming not what we do but who we are. Reaching out in order to gather in. Allowing the spirit enveloping others to enlighten us, thereby gaining insights into what a God-directed service should be.

Servilism in the Twenty-first Century exists when we allow ourselves to crave material things and recognition for superficial achievements.

Jesus wanted none of that. He only asked that we love each other as he loves us. 

©2022 Stu Ervay – All Rights Reserved

CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON SERVICE

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My career as a resident educator included teaching in Texas, Arizona, and Kansas. For years my colleagues and I provided consultant services to school districts in the U.S. and Taiwan.

Most field services and my residential teaching jobs were in America. Which was culturally diverse, influenced in surprising ways: race, religion, attitudes toward learning, local diversions, language, population diversity, weather, the economy, and generational traditions. 

Much teaching and consultant work occurred when that kind of diversity prevailed. 

Before the 2001 imposition of the rigid No Child Left Behind. Before other federally initiated programs meant to micromanage schools. Before the pandemic and rise of today’s political rancor.

The educational era before 2001 featured exploration. Mixed with the joy of community idiosyncrasies. Wrapped in an American spirit that was both unifying and distinctively charming.

Service to educators in that era was relational, conversational, and mutually enlightening. Not procedural or mechanistic. Not advising clients of my nonprofit organization (cliweb.org) how to jump through bureaucratic hoops.

It was a learning experience for both clients and consultants. Interacting in ways that provided new insights and novel ways to solve perplexing problems. Learning new procedures and perspectives that could be useful somewhere else.

Exciting ideas and practices emerged from one cultural setting. Transferred somewhere else for the enrichment of student learning. Give and take. In the American spirit of academic adventure, directed at helping students achieve creatively. Helping them acquire a sense of purpose.

Misguided Definitions of Culture

NCLB was created out of concerns raised in the 1983 Nation at Risk Report. A document and political spark that contained both admonitions for greater academic exploration AND recommendations for controlling what was deemed reckless eclecticism in public school curricula. Both a philosophically expansive idea and a call for systematizing learning outcomes. 

Through the NCLB initiative, the philosophically expansive quest was buried under a rigid method for systematizing student learning outcomes to support uniform economic growth.

NCLB codified and indirectly mandated a growing focus on academic benchmarks and standardized testing. It promised federal funding that never materialized. Concurrently, the courts required equalized funding in each state that reduced the availability of discretionary funds for program improvement and faculty training at the local level.

Until those efforts to nationalize school improvement started, I enjoyed the rich cultural traditions of rural districts in Nebraska. The supportive town meeting decision-making environment in Maine. The dynamic mix of opinions in Chicago. The quest for merging native belief systems into the Zuni, New Mexico curriculum. Figuring out ways to consolidate small school districts in North Dakota to give them better ways to serve students. Acknowledging the importance of family and community values by merging them with a Wyoming district’s curriculum.

The distinctiveness of each state and community within America felt right. Even with such cultural diversity, there was evidence of a national soul. A happy uniqueness existing inside an indulgent national family of eccentrics.

NCLB transported a micro culture invented in Texas to the national stage when George W. Bush was elected president. Bush was convinced his state’s school improvement model was effective. That it should be expanded to the national level. A bipartisan group in Congress agreed, thereby modifying the ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) provisions.

The state’s model was given birth in the entire nation.

Interestingly, Ross Perot was the prime mover. An influential billionaire and political aspirant who had strong and controversial opinions about Texas education programs. Perot was appointed chair of the state’s new Select Committee on Public Education (SCOPE). Perot and the committee attacked what they considered big problems:

  • Poorly compensated teachers. (Perot liked longer days, smaller classes, and merit pay).
  • The dominance of sports programs like football over academic priorities.
  • The 180-day school year, shorter than all other nations.
  • An inadequately challenging academic curriculum, especially in the realms of basic literacy and math skills.
  • A need for achievement tests, especially for those students involved in sports programs.
  • The core value that teachers come from the “dumbest folks in college” and are incompetent.
  • More money spent for education produces no measurable effect on student learning.
  • Schools are bogged down in bureaucracy.
  • No national standards for student learning and no way to measure accountability.
  • Schools are not organized to meet society’s needs because learning is not a priority.
  • Parents do not have enough authority over what happens in schools.

Perot and his committee drew those conclusions from the perspective of the business community. I could agree with many of them. Yet strongly disagree with others.

Although Perot’s run for the presidency as an independent was strong but ultimately unsuccessful, Texas governor Bush did get to the White House. And accomplished at the national level what had become the aspirational culture of the Lone Star State.

That new national culture emerging out of Texas prevailed for many years, then began to morph into something different. But with similar features. Now, COVID-19 has and continues to modify the original plan even more.

Perot was in many ways an exceptional American entrepreneur and political mover. I admire his life’s accomplishments in shaking up a culture that badly needed it. And for creating a new way of thinking and believing.

Where Perot failed was in understanding the inextricable nature of human culture and the value of interacting viewpoints. That public schools and higher education are not meant to have a singular academic focus. Except in those categories of the curriculum that teach skills meant to support survival AND success in a complex society. Which are only tools for applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

Tools that Perot used in highly effective if controversial ways.

His kind of service is not my kind of service because we define the word and characteristics of “culture” differently. Perot defined it as a substructure of economic success. I define it as a means through which all its members can live with a sense of purpose and meaning derived from faith and strong belief systems.

©2022 Stu Ervay – All Rights Reserved

A NECESSARY POST-PANDEMIC MINDSET FOR TEACHER PREPARATION AND STATUS

Service, , , , ,



A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT THE NATURE OF SERVICE — GOOD AND BAD

Service is never one dimensional. It can be offered and delivered for different reasons, some of which are opposites based on practical, political, or religious convictions. Or what one considers correct or incorrect thinking. We serve what we believe at the moment. No matter where or how that belief originated.

My professional service as an educator is rooted in opening intellectual doors to promote critical and creative thinking, which are the foundation for richer and more productive lives. I do not believe in indoctrination. Especially the kind based on promoting skills or actions designed to fulfill intentions of leaders with questionable ambitions or nefarious goals. Or objectives that are either operationally neutral or just mechanistically useful.

Scientists who invented the atom bomb found the project to be an interesting challenge and service to their country. They only later thought about the social implications of their work.

Engineers who designed and built the RMS Titanic and other ships of its class accepted poorly thought-out principles and techniques. To achieve the look of British magnificence and performance. Accepting shortcuts necessary to impress and compete. Which resulted in an unmitigated disaster.

This article is about such ways of thinking and action in our schools for over two decades.

The impact of COVID-19 on schools seems multidimensional. Student enrollment is down. Learning quality has suffered. Teachers and principals are demoralized. Thousands of educators have left or plan to leave.

Multiple solutions are being considered: salary improvements, reductions in certification requirements, and upgrades in working conditions. All quick fixes to address big challenges.

But quick fixes are merely patch jobs. Repairs to keep the schools from sinking until more substantial improvements are made. If ever.

Lessons from the Titanic Disaster

We know the story about the RMS Titanic and its 1912 sinking after striking an iceberg. The iceberg collision revealed fundamental flaws in the ship’s construction and operation.

An iceberg in the ocean was like the COVID-19 pandemic. A phenomenon of nature that proved our human vulnerability and hubris.

For the Titanic it is was bad metallurgy. The use of rivets to assemble the hull’s plates. Poorly designed “waterproof” compartments. Excessive nighttime speed through a field of icebergs. Above all, the advertised claim the ship was unsinkable gave both passengers and the ship’s officers a sense of invulnerability and haughtiness.   

And they paid a horrible price. Similar to what is happening to American young people today.

The pandemic exposed existing issues begun 22 years ago with the creation of No Child Left Behind. NCLB’s inspiring name, just like Titanic, masked serious design flaws. Reducing teachers to the level of civil servants made to comply with bureaucratically created academic standards. Held accountable for student success on high stakes pencil and paper tests. Narrowing curriculum to basic skills, which had the effect of minimizing critical thinking and creative behaviors.

During the worst of the pandemic, teachers were forced to conduct virtual instruction from home. They did not have deep enough knowledge of curricular intentions or modified instructional techniques to maintain momentum. That was the beginning of student learning decline and intense teacher anxiety and depression.

There is no chance of preserving much of anything from the wreck of the Titanic, over two miles under the surface. Only a few artifacts have been lifted from the debris field. Scientists believe the entire ship will disappear by the middle part of the 21st Century.

Is that also the destiny of American education?

What Is Learned from Disasters

Since the loss of the Titanic, much has been learned about the building of large metal ships. And how to save passengers when they founder. Can the same be said for the era begun by NCLB?

Titanic foundered primarily because of inadequate rivets and metallurgical issues with its hull in extremely cold conditions. NCLB foundered because it discounted the value of creative and relational teaching/learning processes. It also placed far too much initial importance on basic skill development in reading and mathematics.

The Titanic’s engineers and builders knew about oceanic conditions and weather-related threats. But, like the inventers of NCLB, discounted the underlying importance of variables. Variables like unusually large icebergs with huge subsurface masses. Or human learning needs that are multitudinous and eclectic.

Titanic’s captain and crew understood the threat of icebergs. They accelerated anyway, because they were told their ship was unsinkable. NCLB theorists believed that high stakes tests designed to assess teacher accountability and promote a competitive spirit between and among schools would improve the quality of student learning.

Both assumptions have been proven wrong.

Titanic sideswiped an iceberg and sank. Schools lost whatever effectiveness they had when teachers were micromanaged. Reduced to the level of civil servants. Required to excessively narrow the curriculum. 

Before running into a pandemic.

Restructuring our schools based on what we have learned will take more time and effort than learning how to build better ships. Good ships need a better understanding of their component parts and how they are assembled. Plus crews that know how to effectively pilot them.

Schools need autonomously professional teachers well prepared in both curriculum and instructional design. Teachers given the authority to stimulate and regularly assess the quality of creative learning.

Preparing teachers in such a comprehensive manner and giving them a work environment that allows them to perform in ways that produce quality 21st Century citizens, is no small task.

Nor can it be based on old mindsets as to what teachers are and do.

The professional status of teachers must far exceed what it is now. Not simply in monetary compensation. But also in terms of how well they inspire students as purposeful future citizens who have the potential to live meaningful lives.

©2022 Stu Ervay – All Rights Reserved