Since school is about to
start all around the country, I want to talk about one of my favorite
educational concepts, the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Developed by
Soviet psychologist and educator Vygotsky, the idea is that if you give a
students work that’s too easy, they’re not going to learn that much. If you
give them work that’s too hard, they will be frustrated and unable to learn
that much. But if you find precisely the next step they need to take in the
learning process and you give them a
little help, they will learn rapidly. This is the art of good teaching,
much of which has been lost in the current curriculum which emphasizes the
teaching of standards rather than students. Standards may work fine in schools
where nearly all students are at grade level, as in the suburbs, but where numbers
of students are behind, standards are worse than useless. Teachers need to
understand where each student is in their learning and help them take the next
step, challenge them without frustrating them.
A similar dialectic happens
in the realm of political organizing. If you call for people to man the
barricades in Revolutionary struggle the way many of us did back in the
seventies, you are too far ahead of the people and they won’t listen. If you
call for maintaining the status quo with only tiny, mostly rhetorical tweaks,
people will not follow you because they already experience the downside of the
status quo, where conditions for most families are actually getting worse. But
if you can put forward a program that challenges them to fight for what they
need and want, they will follow, and I think this is why Bernie Sanders has
been having so much success.
One example from my own
experience: some months ago, I started a blog called Reparations Fund which
advocated for substantial reparations for Black families for their treatment
under slavery and subsequent discrimination. While many people agreed that this
was necessary, they also thought it was pie in the sky, way too unlikely to
ever command sizable support among the people in general. Then, after reading
the Ta-Nehisi Coates
article in the Atlantic “The Case forReparations,” I began to realize that with Bernie Sanders talking about
breaking up the big banks, we could reframe the demand. Coates argues that bank
redlining after World War II has been a significant factor in producing the
wealth gap between Black and white families, which is now 1 to 13. So, it
occurred to me that if we talked about the big banks providing reparations for
the damage they did to the Black community with their redlining, people might
respond more favorably. So far, that has been the case.
The effectiveness of Bernie Sanders and
his program is in part based on his insight into just what the next steps are
for people: under Obama we got ACA, but what we need is single payer. For young
people, college has become unaffordable; let’s make the state universities
free, the way they are in Europe. In each of the policy areas Sanders addresses
from income inequality, campaign finance reform, to racial justice, he advocates
the next step which will move the country forward.
Some are dissatisfied that he hasn’t taken
on the Military Financial Complex (there’s no industry any more), support for
the Palestinian cause, or open borders. As much as we would love for these
issues to be addressed, it is Sander’s judgement that these issues are not yet
the next steps. He also inherently understands that taking on both the military
and the financial sector at once would most likely trigger a reaction from that complex that
would prevent him from taking office by any means necessary.
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