Democracy in Education: Crafting Vision, Policies, and Strategies

A Statement for the John Dewey Society

by

Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Harry C. Boyte, by Deborah Meier

March 2016

“It is the main business of the family and the school to influence directly the formation and growth of attitudes and dispositions, emotional, intellectual and moral. Whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes…a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for…the democratic way of life.” John Dewey, Democracy in the Schools

We face an avalanche of privatization of education at every level, tied to narrowing views which

radically shrink the meaning of democracy and of education. This avalanche increasingly

renders education as a ticket for individual advancement, not public purpose. Education is more

segregated by race and class than in the time of Brown v. Board of Education. Educators feel

increasingly powerless. At the same time education is under widespread attack, with efforts to

shape both K-12 and higher education by outside interests and policy makers, both liberal and

conservative, using marketplace and technocratic rationales. State government in many states

are defunding public post-secondary education. Costs put many schools out of the reach of poor

and working classes. All this contributes to the disempowerment of educators and students.

Internal changes as well as external forces erode the agency of educators and students.

Studies such as American Academic Culture in Transformation, edited by Thomas Bender and

Carl Schorske have demonstrated that research cultures have become increasingly detached

from community and the public culture in many fields in recent decades. Rankings fuel what

Lani Guinier calls the “testocracy,” narrow, individualist understands of merit and achievement

and erode earlier norms of cooperative and democratic excellence in both K-12 and higher

education (The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education). Colleges today,

ranked by how many students are denied admission, often game the system by increasing

applications. Prestige goes to institutions which place students in jobs with the highest pay and

prestige, regardless of public contribution. Sustained, deep attention to skills and habits of

agentic action crucial to a democratic way of life has been sidelined.

It is worth recalling how much agency - the human capacity to act with others to shape the world

around us - was central both to the original meaning of democracy and also to the concerns of

John Dewey. As Josiah Ober, the classicist and political theorist, has shown in a detailed

etymological study of classical regime types (“The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to

Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations 2008, 7), democracy for the Greeks did not mean

rule by the majority. “Rather it means, more capaciously, ‘the empowered demos … the

collective strength and ability to act...and indeed to reconstitute the public realm through action.”

Though Dewey rarely used the term “agency,” it is worth recalling the close connection between

agency, individual and civic, and his view of democracy as an empowering way of life. In

Democracy and Education, he proposed that education involves cultivating “initiative and

adaptability” (MW 9, 93-94). Following Jane Addams’ call for educators to “free the powers,”

Dewey advanced the idea that democracy’s diversity of stimuli “secure a liberation of powers”

(Jane Addams, On Education, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994, 98; Dewey, MW 9, 93)

Emphasizing the relational qualities of development against atomizing intellectual trends, he

argued that “the new individualism was interpreted philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an assertion that

each individual’s mind was complete in isolation from everything else” (MW 9, 315).

Drawing on the Deweyan tradition, many educators and scholars have begun to fight back and

also to re-articulate why the public matters in education and why education’s deepest purpose is

preparing students for a democratic society. In K-12 education, new programs help educators

to build students and their own civic agency and capacity. Deliberating in a Democracy helps

educators and students design lessons for deliberating difficult issues. The Discovering Justice

program helps elementary and middle school students explore meanings of justice and the law.

“Action Civics” movements and programs such as Public Achievement, Mikva Challenge and

The Freechild Project help young people to learn skills of effective civic action in schools and

communities, including learning and research about problems, everyday political skills, and

sustained reflection. Expeditionary Learning, The Algebra Project, and the Big Picture Company

tie learning to real world community projects and problems. The Coalition for Essential Schools

emphasizes democratic principles, as well as the “student as worker and the teacher as coach,”

shifting from education as something delivered.

At the post-secondary level, recent associations such as Campus Compact, Imagining America,

the American Democracy Project, The Democracy Challenge and AAC&U, are developing a

new emphasis on higher education’s role in democracy as well as innovative approaches to

education for student agency. The Kettering Foundation’s Campus Conversations on

Democracy brings together presidents to recover their leadership as public philosophers of

education and democracy. Two national deliberations of the National Issues Forums growing

out of the American Commonwealth Partnership in 2012, celebrating the 150 anniversary of

land grant colleges, Shaping Our Future: How Can Higher Education Help Us Create the

Society We Want?, and The Changing World of Work: What Should We Ask of Higher

Education?, have involved several thousand citizens in every region of the country. These have

surfaced deep public concerns about higher education’s future and loss of public purposes.

Deweyan concerns with agency also form one inspiration for the new transdisciplinary field

called “civic studies,” founded by a group of seven engaged political theorists. The group,

including Elinor Ostrom, past present of the American Political Science Association and 2009

Nobel Prize winner, and future APSA president Jane Mansbridge, is organized as a framework

for civic engagement focused on themes of agency and citizens as co-creators of communities

at different scales. Tufts University hosts the website and an annual international institute. The

Civic Studies journal is The Good Society.

All these are foundations to build on. Yet the dynamic trends of privatization and technocracy

continue to gather momentum on campuses, in curriculum and in educational policy. How can

we reimagine a public educational ecosystem with revitalized democratic aims, and effectively

work to enact it in practice, policy, and law?

We are convinced that this is the time to work with others in organizing a democracy movement

of K-16 educators and students and our allies, reimagining education as crucial to a democratic

way of life for ourselves and for future generations, advancing policies that support democracy

education, and creating strategies to build broad publics. Here are several potential elements:

• Strategy, grounded in local, grassroots effort, needs to include state and national prongs of action, across educational sectors and in diverse coalitions of community and civic organizations. Many tools will be necessary for this work, including public deliberation, organizing, experimentation, research, and a robust strategy of what can be called “cultural organizing, stimulating wide public discussion in many media settings.
• Deliberations and organizing efforts need to be informed by research and scholarship that is transdisciplinary not simply interdisciplinary. This means recognizing that while academic scholars are creating new knowledge of great value we also need new patterns of collaborative knowledge-creation and infrastructures and reward systems which support them, recognizing the multiple kinds of knowledge needed for effective political democratic change.
• At local and regional levels, we need new strategies for deliberation and organizing action for change that builds new, deeper, more reciprocal relationships with scholars and schools, students, parents and families, civic groups and local governments, asking “why” and “so what” questions with new forcefulness.
• At the state level where much education policy is established, we need to “bring the public in,” creating citizen-based deliberations about the purposes of education at every level. Representatives and participants from schools, teachers unions, families, businesses, religious and civic groups, and community organizations as well as local governments will need to be involved.
• We also need ways to bring findings of public deliberations to new levels of public visibility through new media tools and through partnerships with sympathetic journalists and opinion-makers in the mainstream media. This will be essential to effect a significant shift from the narrow test-based accountability that lawmakers and others have devised in the last two decades.
• At the federal level, we need a variety of strategies to engage a new administration with the Deweyan vision of democracy as a way of life and education as its midwife.

A democratic education vision for K-16 publicly supported education in the U.S. and for policies

that strengthen the democratic purposes of private and liberal arts education will require

leadership in all sectors, from all corners of educational practice, policy, and research. How to

develop such leadership will require discussion and thought about what is the appropriate

organizing form and structure for such work. But the need seems unmistakable.

In our history, democracy had overtones of immensity. "A word the real gist of which still sleeps,

quite unawakened...a great word, whose history remains unwritten," as Walt Whitman put it in

Democratic Vistas.

It is time to awaken the possibilities of the word.

The John Dewey Society 2016 D&E Centennial

The John Dewey Society will be celebrating the Centennial of the publication of John Dewey’s magisterial Democracy and Education in Washington DC on April 7 and 8, 2016. Please plan to participate in this historic celebration. Take out your calendars and mark these dates: April 7 and 8, 2016.

The Centennial Conference will take place the historic Thurgood Marshall Center - where Thurgood Marshall and his NAACP colleagues developed the legal strategies for victory over school segregation in Brown v. Board. The center is located at: 1816 12th St NW, Washington, DC 20009

We want everyone interested in democratic education to participate. The meeting will be free and open to the public, and will take place immediately prior to the annual meeting of the John Dewey Society and the American Educational Research Association. 

But space is limited: reserve your spot today! (See below for how to reserve your spot!)

Why Celebrate the Centennial of Democracy and Education?

Democracy and Education is the most important book on education in the twentieth century, and is the bible of democratic education worldwide. Democracy and Education is cited more frequently each year that all other classics of American educational studies - those by G. Stanley Hall, Alfred Binet, Edward Thorndike and others - combined!

Democracy and Education has been translated into every major world language and has inspired innovations and experiments in democratic education - in public schools and private experimental schools - in the United States and throughout the world - for one hundred years. Democracy and Education is more relevant today than ever. We need to come together to celebrate its centennial, and to renew our commitment to democratic education. Please join us!

Democracy and Education Today

Despite the efforts of thousands of dedicated educators and parents, schools in the United States today are still suffering under the domination of top-down standardized education: compulsory curriculum standards, pre-determined learning objectives, and high stakes standardized tests. This standardization regime is sold as ‘preparing all learners for the global economy’. In fact, it merely traps young people in a rat race for high test scores and endless competition for slots in competitive colleges. Children from elite families win; the rest struggle to survive.

The standardization regime compels teachers to abandon their hard-won practical knowledge, ignore the strengths of individual learners, and teach for the tests; It compels learners to give up their own passions and goals to conform to a system where their own interests and aims count for nothing. Instead of ‘no child left behind,’ this regime should be called ‘no child left alive,’ as it has a deadening effect hostile to individual passions and group aspirations. Instead of moving ahead - growing - young people are all too often trapped in isolation, boredom, frustration, and rigged competition. 

The message of Democracy and Education - its challenge to the standardization regime - needs to be re-stated, critically digested, re-interpreted for today’s educational situation, and disseminated for today’s teachers, parents and young people. 

It’s core message is clear: 

• that education of young people is not preparation for adult life but life itself,
• that the only aims worth pursuing in education are the aims of the learners themselves, as individuals and as members of groups,
• that teaching consists primarily in structuring learning environments that engage learners in pursuing their aims - alone or in cooperative groups, 
• that school lessons, however necessary to convey abstract and general relations, are a peripheral, and often dangerously overused component of schooling,
• that democracy is built through cooperation and communication across racial, ethnic, gender, class, religious, political and philosophical differences as learners work together to achieve practical aims. 

Why Participate in the Centennial Event?

Through presentations and workshops, the Democracy and Education Centennial in Washington on April 7-8 2016 will offer you a chance to renew your appreciation of this great work, to exchange ideas with other educators, to think through its message for today, and to renew your commitment to democratic education. 

How to Participate?

The conference will feature invited presentations by leading scholars and democratic educators. The program committee will soon be finalizing its selection of invited speakers and workshop presenters, and you will hear exciting information about them in the months ahead. Meanwhile, all of your suggestions are welcome. 

Please mark your calendar and join us in Washington on April 7-8, 2016.

To reserve a spot, simply send an email to Kyle Greenwalt, JDS Secretary-Treasurer, at greenwlt@msu.edu and put the term ‘reserve’ (without the quotes) in the subject line. 

You can reserve for yourself and a colleague in one email by providing the name and email address of yourself and your colleague. But if you want to assure more reservations, please promote the meeting to others and make sure that they send emails to reserve their spaces. Requesting a space indicates that you have placed the centennial event on your calendar and plan to attend. We want to assure a lively and enthusiastic participation, but space is limited.

Zero Tolerance and the Failure to Educate

The older I get and the more exposure I have to schooling and educational policy in the United States, the more I wonder if we like children.

I was recently reminded of this when I saw yet another example of a very young child given an absurd penalty because of an over-literal interpretation of a “zero tolerance” policy in a local school (http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2011/01/21/First-grader-punished-for-finger-pointing/UPI-42171295600400/). The details of this case—first grade boy suspended because he pointed his finger as though it was a gun—are the sort that get people either laughing at the disconnect between the action and the severity of the response or outraged for the same reason. After all, a child’s finger, on even the most liberal interpretations of zero tolerance, is not a gun. But that response misses a deeper point: zero tolerance policies renege on the promise that schools are in the business of education for democratic life.

Mindless forms of “classroom management” have triumphed over efforts to help children become better people. And we know there are more positive and more effective – more educational – ways to respond to bad behavior in schools (see, for example Deborah Meier’s The Power of Their Ideas or Vivian Paley’s You Can’t Say, You Can’t Play). Perhaps it is because of the increasing focus on maximizing time on task in order to increase test scores, but I am not sure that is the reason: the policy of treating children like animals predates the regime of testing so often supposed to be its cause. Behavioral control has been the approach of “classroom management” for all of my professional life, and I started teaching high school in 1968.

One district where I was employed adopted Lee Canter’s “Assertive Discipline” program in the 1970’s; the catch-phrase of this program was “deal with the behavior, not the child.” I heard this from many teachers, always expressed with pride. The idea always puzzled me, however, because I has become a teacher because I wanted to deal with children, and in line with that commitment, I have always believed that a child’s behavior is a part of who the child is, and to treat those two things as separable is to fail to understand our role in democracy as much as it is to violate the integrity of the person the child is.

There are two reasons we should reject the emphasis on behavioral strategies for controlling behavior and “classroom management”: they are demeaning to both the children against whom they are used and to the teachers forced to use them, and they diminish the likelihood that our public schools will form democratic citizens. When they work, even when they are applied rationally, zero tolerance policies shape behavior by fear, not by consideration of what sort of people they should be, or what sort of choices they should make. Further, such policies send the message that the school and the adults in it do not think the child who breaks a rule counts for very much. They make clear to all children that the adults in the school consider the children to be disposable.

Zero tolerance policies explicitly state for all to see that we consider our rules more important than our children, and our children see this. Even the children who obey the rules understand where they stand in a regime of zero-tolerance. This will certainly increase the alienation children and young adults feel toward schools.

Children will sometimes behave badly. They will break rules, even really serious, important rules. Such events can be seen as opportunities to banish the miscreants, or as an opportunity to educate. Only the last honors our claim to be educators trying to prepare children to be citizens in a democratic society.

One of my former colleagues wisely suggested that the way to be more effective in classrooms is to “be the child,” to try to understand what need the child is meeting my misbehavior and then to help the child meet that need in more positive ways. This is not at all to suggest that classrooms should be places of permissiveness or places where there are no rules that matter. It is to suggest that our job is to help children understand and internalize the norms of democratic life the rules are meant to enact, and that they best learn democracy by living it. However, when we replace citizen formation with zero tolerance policies we do not prepare them for democratic life, but for what some now refer to as the school-to-prison-pipeline (http://justicepolicycenter.org/Articles%20and%20Research/Research/testprisons/SCHOOL_TO_%20PRISON_%20PIPELINE2003.pdf).

I do not understand why so many educators think the proper response to children who are alienated from the school’s social contract (I am making a large assumption here, I know) is to exacerbate and formalize that alienation with the official proclamation that they really do not belong. I do not understand how a culture that valued its young could make zero tolerance a policy.

One final irony: this incident took place in Oklahoma where—I could not make this up—there is a serious on-going effort in the state legislature to make actual guns on school, college, and university campuses legal.

Maxine Greene Tribute Now Online

The Journal of Educational Controversy is pleased to announce that the winter 2010 issue on “Arts, Social Imagination and Democratic Education” is now online. This issue is dedicated to the life and work of Maxine Greene.


We would like to draw the readers’ attention to an innovation that we introduced in this issue. In place of one of the printed articles, we are providing the reader a slide show of a child’s artistic drawings, with the author’s voice describing to the readers the significance of what they are viewing in the child’s work. The author traces the motifs found consistently in the child’s drawing over the course of several years so the reader/viewer can gain insight into the child’s imaginative communities, values, and dreams.


We invite readers to contribute formal refereed responses to our Rejoinder Section or more spontaneous responses on our journal’s blog.

Next Issue: The Role of Professionals in the Public Square


Future Issues:
The Education our Children Deserve
The Modern University in Turbulent Times
The School to Prison Pipeline
The Effect of Cultural Diversity on the Schools across the Globe: A Comparative Look

(Cross-posted on the Journal of Educational Controversy Blog)

Social Journalism and Education

Woody Lewis at Mashable writes that on-line social media have replaced the traditional newspaper/magazine media as sources of fast breaking on-the-ground news.

To grasp the power of social media think of the citizens who caught the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD 30 years ago. They could have turned off their cameras and called 911 or the LA Times but did not. Todays citizen advocacy and investigative blogs play a similar role. Lewis explains:

The Web is now the sole distribution channel for newspapers that can no longer afford to publish hardcopy, and those that don’t follow the best practices of social media may see their brands marginalized in cyberspace as well. Social journalism, an extension of those practices, is now an essential component of any news organization’s strategy.

Citizen journalists post photos of fast-breaking events, and cover stories from a different angle than legacy news organizations, but it’s the premeditated watchdog or advocacy role that defines a social journalist. Another factor is the network effect: people using social media to communicate and collaboratively produce content. Editors are still important, but the pieces are shaped by crowd dynamics and the velocity of information.

Lewis' post runs through the past-present-future of social media and is worth a close read. He sees advocacy blogs with an investigative bent as playing a major role going forward.

Take-away

Progressive educators frequently complain about the educational coverage in news and the retrograde policies pushed by even progressive politicians. On-line educational journalism by teachers and students, documenting school conditions and amplfying the voices of concerned teachers and students, would offer a counterpoint and a pressure for change.

For a Progressive President, a Very Nonprogressive Educational Policy

Cross-posted from the Journal of Educational Controversy Blog.

The progressive language implicit in many of President Obama's programs was no where to be found in the educational policy that he unveiled recently in his speech on education. Rather than an imaginative vision on what we need for public schools in a complex 21st century democracy, President Obama fell back on the language of neoconservatives for things like rewarding teachers and more school choice at least through more charter schools. Essentially, his proposal for new mechanisms for making changes in the educational system lacked any discussion on what these changes were meant to accomplish. For example, a recommendation for more charter schools is a rather neutral suggestion. The real question is: for what purpose and to what end? That requires a much deeper conversation about the public purposes of education for a democracy that is constantly reinventing itself. For some, it is an opportunity to introduce new ideas and innovative approaches. For others, it provides an avenue for choices within our public school system that can meet the diverse needs, aspirations and talents of our children. For still others, charter schools have been seen as a path to privatization and the dismantling of the public schools and teacher unions.

But more importantly, lurking behind President Obama's educational policy are the silent assumptions that have controlled the national debate for decades. A genuine national discussion on educational reform requires that we start to discuss that which has been undiscussable, namely, that the language of the market place has become the language of education. Students are talked about as the human capital that keeps the national economy competitive. But, as educational critic, John Goodlad, has constantly pointed out from surveys taken to determine parents' desires for their children, parents' visions are not limited to seeing their children as human capital or workers for a competitive market force. They consistently say that they want their children treated as whole human beings, nurtured in their growth, inspired in their dreams, and empowered in their civic voice. Of course, the usual retort here is that such goals are not inconsistent with the goal of producing a working force for the labor market. That is true. And so is the response by parents whose children have been marginalized in the schools. They very rightly are demanding that their children succeed in a competitive labor market at the same level that the children of the more privileged have succeeded. Both of these responses are legitimate. But the force of the arguments is to silence the national conversation that we should be having. In a public school system that serves both democracy and capitalism, the language of the market place prevails and all other discourses are on the edge. It is that conversation that the public needs to have. Nations are guided by the stories they tell about themselves. What story are we telling ourselves about the public purposes of our schools?



Readers who are interested in looking at the issues associated with "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," may want to read our Volume 3 Number 1 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy.

Fear, Prudence and Opportunity

This week freedom fighter/terrorist William Ayers (who is also an educational theorist and reformer) will be giving an endowed education lecture at Millersville University (Pennsylvania) where I teach.   Ayers coming has generated a high level of controversy in the community as legislators have demanded cancellation, citizens have written damning letters to the editor, and "patriots" have made, ironically enough, terroristic threats against the University and its President.  Press coverage has been significant and generally fair. (For a look, go to www.lancasteronline.com and search "Ayers.") 

The University President has made it clear that the lecture will go on, but the university is under an intellectual "lock down."  Tickets for the lecture were limited to students, faculty and staff, and community in that order, and supplies were exhausted before the faculty stepped up to claim theirs.  Faculty members have been directed not to talk about the lecture or the lecturer.  Security is -- appropriately -- heightened.  

What follows is my commentary on the decision to limit discussion and downplay Ayers' visit.  It will appear in the university newspaper, "The Snapper," this week.

What are we afraid of?  Bill Ayers is coming to MU and we’re missing a huge educational opportunity.  We’ve opted instead for prudence.  Nobody will ever know for sure if that was the right choice, but we can at least meditate a bit on the decision.

We could all -– conservatives and liberals, hippies and preppies, protestors and supporters – have been licking our chops.  We could have planned teach ins and special sessions, sold books and passed around electronic copies of articles, engaged the whole community, invited them to join us in our dialogue about who we are as American educators -- because Bill Ayers embodies two issues that are the bread and butter of American politics and American education.

The first issue involves civil disobedience.  Ayers protested -- violently and admittedly illegally -- against the war in Vietnam and the draft that threatened the lives of his generation of men.  Property was destroyed.  Was he right to do so?  Does his case meet Thoreau’s standards for challenging the tax collector?  How is Ayers’ case different from the Boston Tea Party for instance? 

The second question asks what education is for.   Ayers espouses education for intellectual freedom (rather than for economic adjustment), not just for those with the means to exercise such freedom but for those disempowered students who attend urban schools.  Is his position the obvious one for a democratic educator or is it an anarchist challenge to American capitalism?  Or perhaps both?   These are fabulous questions, worthy of our consideration and definitive of the liberal arts education we claim to provide. 

Some say – even some who agree with Ayers’ educational philosophy and see, in his Weatherman days, justifiable civil disobedience – that we shouldn’t have invited Ayers to give the Lockey Lecture.  “Not prudent” (as Dana Garvey used to say in his imitation of the first George Bush).  No, it probably wasn’t prudent.  But it’s done now and I’m glad it is.  I have read the often nasty letters to the editor of the past several weeks , but I have also listened to friends and others -- near and far – comment on how pleased they are that Millersville is  hosting Ayers and/or that the university is not caving to unreasonable demands.

Unfortunately, though, we’re not licking our chops.   We are hunkered down, waiting for this too to pass.

Let me be clear.  President McNairy has stood tall on the issue of academic freedom.  She has done so in a dignified way in the face of organized opposition. I applaud the Administration, not for backing up Bill Ayers, but for finding a center and staying there.  And the Administration has exercised prudence, acting to control the media buzz, the potential circus of protestors, and the unfortunately real possibility of “counter-terror.” But our prudence is preventing learning.   We are not engaging the community; we are excluding them.

Why didn’t CCERP (Center for Community Engagement) grab a hold of this and schedule speakers who balanced Ayers’ presence, including especially our own alums who have spoken eloquently in local papers on both sides of both issues?  Why didn’t the Office of Social Equity use their considerable talents at facilitating dialogue on difficult issues to invite every single person who wrote a letter to the editor or made a phone call to sit at a table with a liberal faculty member and conservative member (there are some, you know J), with conservative student and a liberal student (there are some, you know J) to talk all of this through?  Why isn’t the School of Education changing the location to Pucillo Gym as we did with former Lockey Lecturer Jonathan Kozol in order to encourage every future and present teacher to attend?

The answer is prudence – and that scares me.  This “teachable moment” is passing us by. 

Perhaps you aren’t familiar with the concept “teachable moment.”  It refers to the instant when the stars align and the light is concentrated just where you need it to be in a classroom.   Something happens and all of a sudden everybody’s paying attention.  And they’re paying attention because what they have taken for granted has been challenged.  And that, my friends, is the description of openness, of optimum conditions for learning.

I know.  Teachable moments are painful – even dangerous -- moments.  They are; there’s no way around it.  And often we’d just as soon avoid the teachable moments and go on pretending that this is a temporary problem and not a persistent opening to growth and wisdom.  But we can’t. Once the door is open, students are learning.

So what are they learning from us now that Bill Ayers’ coming opened the door?

They are learning that we as a community will stand up for academic freedom and freedom of speech – and that’s a wonderful thing.  But they also know that we have chosen prudence over growth – and that’s less wonderful.

I suppose it isn’t prudent of me to write this essay.  But no matter.  It is my way of seizing the opportunity that the Ayers’ appearance offers.  I don’t know if Ayers is worth the hubbub.  But we are.  We are worth the hassle of protests.  We are worth the struggle to communicate and to understand even where we can’t agree.  That is why we are here.