Half the country is celebrating that their presidential candidate won the election, and I respect the place those citizens are in right now. I, however, am writing this from the perspective of someone who is not on that winning side. As I process how we can move forward and begin to build more unity as a country, I am grieving. I sit in disbelief, with deep sadness and concern.
My current work is related to helping education leaders and others decrease political polarization and human demonization. I cannot excuse the words and behaviors of the newly elected president. The rhetoric he has used is mean, disrespectful, and divisive. I have spent 25 years in public education and I worry a lot about what our leaders are modeling for our children. I want to see a president who models character, empathy, and kindness.
And yet, I will not paint his supporters with the same brush. People are genuinely frustrated by high costs, lack of housing, and unproductive politics. They are fearful of the uncertainty in the world; they are unsure of the evolution of our country.
We are all being fed a series of lies about each other. That鈥檚 real. And I can understand that. History teaches us that in times of uncertainty, humans often pivot to fear and tribalism. No matter who won the election, undoing this tribalism is the work of the upcoming days, months, and years so that we can create greater understanding across the divide. Educators have to be the first to model this understanding.
The work I see in front of us is about coming together to stand up for humanity and for each other. We must undo how much we think we hate each other and how much we think the 鈥渙ther side鈥� is evil. Our students inevitably absorb this mentality, and they are acting it out now, too.
Moving forward after this bitter loss for those of us who hoped for a different outcome, I鈥檒l be thinking and talking to education leaders, teachers, and students about those things as I host workshops and trainings for them.
We disagree, yes. That鈥檚 healthy, if we do it right. The good news is that we are not as paralyzingly polarized and filled with hatred as we might think. Recent surveys from and suggest that from 67 percent to 87 percent of us are tired of the divisiveness of American politics. That gives me hope.
And though there are ideological differences on the issues that seemingly divide us (guns, environment, education, abortion, race, sexual identity, gender identity), we must be able to talk, ask questions, and show a genuine interest in understanding those differences. Only then can we begin to understand where someone else is coming from, learn from them, respect their views, and even develop some potential paths forward to find common ground.
Progress seems a whole lot better to me than paralysis. If we could just set aside the images that show a small minority of people fanning hatred, take a deep breath, and summon the courage to engage with the others and to turn off our 鈥渃hannels,鈥� then we may be pleasantly surprised.
And I鈥檝e got to believe that we can harness that 67 percent to 87 percent majority to encourage a different kind of politics and engagement. We need to help our students be curious and practice dialogue respectfully with each other to bridge these gaps.
Within the collective education sector and beyond, we have got to figure out a way to harness the vast majority of us who are willing to talk, problem-solve, understand differences, and make progress. Our sanity, country, children, and families depend on it.
In my mind, we in the education sector need to:
- Build a new political 鈥渕achine鈥� around public education. In particular, we must recruit reasonable, curious school board member candidates who understand there are nuances involved in solving every problem. Encourage students to get involved in the school board process to start civic engagement and learning there.
- Revamp the incentive structure for elections. Some cities and states are experimenting with different election methods鈥攔anked-choice voting, for example. I鈥檓 excited to see what we learn about how such changes might allow reasonable people with nuanced views to win school board and other elections.
- Embrace a different narrative about who we can be as a country. We can discuss, disagree, listen, compromise, and find new ways to make progress on intractable problems. Many organizations and initiatives鈥攊ncluding More in Common, Starts with Us, Unite America, Courageous Conversations, and Rebuild Congress鈥攁re working to galvanize this type of thinking. This is also the type of work we are doing with FORWARD at PEBC, where we help education leaders find solutions that offer 鈥渂oth/and鈥� rather than 鈥渆ither/or鈥� thinking.
- Teach students to disagree in a productive way. We need to make sure we have strong civics teaching embedded in all coursework. Gamelike tools such as (for middle and high schoolers) and (for college students) can encourage young people to have moderated conversations with each other on challenging issues.
- Reject 鈥渃ancel culture.鈥� In schools and elsewhere, we must counter the idea that if you say the wrong thing or ask a question, you are shunned or called out for making an honest mistake. Fear does not cultivate curiosity, learning, understanding, and forgiveness.
As our forefathers and mothers knew, conflict and disagreement, when done well, make us a better and stronger democracy. If we bring the diversity of our thinking, experiences, and wisdom together, we can find creative, nuanced paths forward. We are certainly not going to do it divided.
I don鈥檛 know how long it will take our country to better come together in this moment of our democratic experiment, but most people don鈥檛 want to stay in a deeply divisive space. I have hope that a collective effort with our students can give us the political will to do something different.
