Love, Happiness, and America's Schools

Abstract

Some want schools reformed to produce high performers who become our future leaders. Others want schools that teach students how to live, share, and serve others in a world of anger, violence, poverty, and personal turmoil. But competition and high performance need not take the place of happiness, love, and service, Mr. Hoyle and Mr. Slater aver. The despot will lightly forgive his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love one another. . . . He calls those who try to unite their efforts to create a general prosperity turbulent and restless spirits, and twisting the natural meaning of words, he calls those good citizens who care for none but themselves. - Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, 1835 Isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our time. - Allan Bloom Love and Friendship, 1993 ONE OF the most important tasks for educational leadership in America today is to put love at the center of the American educational vision. It certainly does not occupy such a place now. Indeed, love is becoming increasingly peripheral to the picture of what American schools should do and be. In our scramble to be globally competitive, in the ways that we are implementing accountability, we are losing sight of the one ingredient that, if given its proper place, is most likely to help us achieve our goals. This ingredient is love, and certain conditions are necessary if it is to be part of the schooling process. Our society has reached such a state - sociologists are calling us the cynical society1 - that it is increasingly difficult for us to talk about love and the essential role that it must play in an education for a democracy. But talk about it we must, for it is in the nature of modern capitalist democracies that they increasingly breed isolation, anomie, and discontent. And love is the most powerful corrective we have for these self-destructive tendencies. So let us be clear at the outset. We do not want to turn attention to the problem of love in education because we are romantics. On the contrary, there is nothing at all romantic about our argument. It is based on the hard realities of our society. Tocqueville and Hyper-Individualism in America Our point grows out of a discussion about democracy started by Alexis de Tocqueville over a century and a half ago in his classic Democracy in America.2 Tocqueville observed that, for all its virtues, democracy also has its vices. It tends to go to extremes. When it does, it produces destructive imbalances in the lives of both individuals and organizations. The task of leadership in a democracy, Tocqueville maintained, is to recognize the points at which democracy tends to become imbalanced, to get others to see them, and then to mobilize a collective effort to correct the imbalances before they go too far and undermine democracy itself.3 One of democracy's principal imbalances, Tocqueville says, has to do with the relationship between self and others. For various reasons, democracy undermines over time our capacity to develop profound connections with others. It fosters hyper-individualism. In a democracy people have the opportunity to become self-sufficient and self-reliant, and as they become more so, they need others less and less. Tocqueville was convinced that, as individualism continued to grow, each man may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart. Preoccupied more and more with their own concerns and successes, Americans would increasingly let the government manage their general affairs, thus giving it increasing amounts of power. Ultimately there would come a time when power would become so concentrated that freedom itself would be lost and democracy would be replaced by tyranny and despotism. In a recent study, Robert Bellah and his colleagues found data that support Tocqueville's predictions about the growth of hyper- individualism in the United States: The central problem of our book concerns the American individualism that Tocqueville described with a mixture of admiration and anxiety. …