Dear Brandeis community,

 

It is one of the great pleasures of being an educator that ours is a highly collaborative profession, with strong cultures of mentorship and mutual support. As a school head, I have several peer groups with whom I meet regularly, from the Northern California Jewish day school heads group to a dialogue group with fellow San Francisco independent school heads. We had a meeting of the latter group this week, and in it I was caught by a phrase, one that set the stage for this morning’s writing. A fellow head was coming off a stint serving on a jury, and shared a bit of her experience, beginning her observations with “As a new citizen….” She meant it literally, being only a year into her citizenship (despite many years living here), but it got me thinking about what this democracy of ours would look like if we approached it with a beginner’s mind.

 

This is a week of attention to democracy, of course, with the inauguration on the horizon, and President Obama’s farewell address to the nation on Tuesday. In that speech, he spoke of the responsibility each of us has as a citizen—to participate, and to make thoughtful choices as we do so. Two hundred forty-one years in, it is easy to forget that the founding ideals of our country gave each of us rights and responsibilities to go along with those rights; easy to take for granted the power of a government by the people and for the people; easy to criticize and complain, without, as Allen Ginsberg memorably ended his poem “America,” putting our “queer shoulder to the wheel.”

 

As a student of democracy and a student of poetry though, Ginsberg is not typically where I turn in such moments. If there were a poet laureate of the American experiment, it would have to be Walt Whitman, who sang the body politic electric in the mid-nineteenth century, when these ideas were newer, and their magic more tangible. Last night, thinking of my America, I opened my ratty copy of Whitman’s Collected Poems, and turned to the sixteenth section of his masterpiece, “Song of Myself”:

 

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,

Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,

Stuff’d with the stuff that is course and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,

One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,

[…]

A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,

A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,

Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,

A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentlemen, sailor, quaker,

Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.

 

For Whitman, the democratic project is one of true inclusivity—to speak with a voice that includes all the voices of the nation. This is an ideal that our founding documents strive toward as well—the self-evident truth that we are all created equal in the Declaration of Independence, the “We the People” that opens our Constitution. My America holds such ideals close, and recognizes their preciousness and precariousness.

 

At Brandeis, we teach these ideals in ways small and large, too varied to list: building kindness by connecting our middle schoolers and youngest students through our mentoring program; building courage with deepening math challenges, or on stage, or on the basketball court; building responsibility through ongoing days of service, or field trips to the Superior Court as much as to Google. Ultimately, we are working toward a new curricular model to teach democracy, centered on radical empathy, to ensure that our Brandeis graduates will leave prepared to lead the America of this century.

 

In the Jewish tradition, we tell the story of Passover each year, so that each generation will feel as if they personally had been freed from bondage in Egypt. As Ezra Pound described the task of poetry, we make it new. This, I believe, is the task ahead for us as educators and as parents: to make our children new citizens, who will open their eyes to this nation of ours and see it still sparkling with promise and possibility.

 

Wishing you weekends full of such newness, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan