2009 Keynote Address


Bruce L. Mallory
Provost and Executive Vice President
Professor of Education

Bruce Mallory was appointed Provost and Executive Vice President at the University of New Hampshire in July 2003. Previously, he was Senior Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School at UNH (1997-2003). Dr. Mallory has been a professor of education (early childhood and special education) since 1979; he chaired the UNH Department of Education from 1987 to 1993.

Dr. Mallory received the Ph.D. in Special Education and Community Psychology from George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. Earlier experience includes service as a public school teacher, VISTA volunteer, director of Head Start programs, and legislative researcher. His work at UNH has concentrated on the design of programs and social policies that support young children with disabilities and their families, cross-cultural research in developed and developing countries regarding disability and child care policy, and the role of deliberative democratic practices in community change and higher education reform. Dr. Mallory is co-founder and chair of the board of directors of The Democracy Imperative, a national network of scholars and practitioners committed to strengthening democracy through higher education. He also serves on the board of the Paul J. Aicher Foundation and is a member of the executive committee of the Council of Academic Affairs of NASULGC.  He is recipient of the UNH Excellence in Public Service Award (1997) and the President’s Excellence through Diversity Award (2007). 

 

The Honor of Citizenship: Education, Midwifery, and Democracy

Good afternoon and welcome to the students who have achieved the University’s highest honors, the parents who have loved and supported you throughout your lives and now hope to God that you will find both meaningful and remunerative ways to apply your advanced education, and to the faculty who knew that you had it in you to get to this day even when you were convinced that you did not.

I am honored and humbled to be before you today.  The University provides the highest possible levels of education to those who choose to pursue it.  Each of you has done so, not only by finding your personal intellectual passions but by actively seeking the most challenging classes, professors, and assignments in which to exercise those passions.  What I am going to talk about in the next few minutes is how I understand what you all have done as an act of citizenship.  I want to sketch out some ideas about the educational process, the necessary link between education and democratic practices, and the values and conditions that foster such a link.

The title of this talk, printed in your program, uses the metaphor of the midwife to represent the nature of the relationship between education and democracy. I draw this idea directly from the most influential educational philosopher in American history, John Dewey.  Dewey literally wrote the book on the connection to which I am referring.  In his Democracy and Education, published in 1944, toward the end of his illustrious career, Dewey lays out the necessary interdependence of democratic society and universal education, based on an understanding of the progressive nature of individual human development and the value of active engagement of learners with concrete, socially relevant phenomena.  Dewey wrote, “In each generation, democracy must be borne anew, and education is its midwife.”  What he meant was that democracy is a living experiment, as Thomas Jefferson originally conceived it and as Francis Moore Lappe has written in Democracy’s Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy Back to Life.  As a living process, one that is malleable and subject to both advancement and corruption, democracy depends on an educated, morally responsible, active citizenry.  It is we the people who create democracy anew every generation, and we do so as we learn the traditions and beliefs of our ancestors and create new ways of living and interpreting the world for future generations.  Education provides to us the cultural tools, the critical capacities, and the aesthetic and moral judgments necessary for democracy to achieve its ideals.

To illustrate the link between democracy and education more concretely, I will tell two stories learned during field-based research I was able to carry out with Rebecca New in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.  My focus in the project was to understand the political and cultural climate of 20th century Italy as the context for the creation of high quality, sustained, publicly funded infant care and preschool programs in several northern Italian cities.  What became apparent over the three years of interviews, surveys, and document reviews was that contemporary social policies that support young children and their families are rooted in the particular political and cultural ideologies that emerged from the widespread resistance to Mussolini’s dictatorship in the 1930’s and early ‘40’s.

So my first story is about post-war Italy, in the late 1940’s, when the country was emerging from the devastation and depredation resulting from the fierce battles fought by the Italian and German armies against the allied troops.  During the war, the Italian resistance was made up of peasant sharecroppers, men and women equally, primarily from central and northern regions of the country.  These peasants were joined by laborers from the industrial centers of Milano, Turino, and Genova.  The experiences of the resistance fighters, many of whom were captured and sent to German concentration camps, fostered two core social values that later influenced the creation of public early childhood programs beginning in the 1960’s.  First, the equal status of women who fought alongside men and often took on the most dangerous tasks acting as couriers behind the Italian and German lines, affirmed a growing 20th century belief in Italy that women should be afforded the same rights and respect that men had traditionally enjoyed.  The very first Italian Constitution, drafted in 1947, guarantees equal rights, equal access to work, and equal pay for women.  These, of course, are core values of a democratic society, so I will come back to this in a moment.

The second value that solidified after the war was to never again put children in the middle of armed conflict.  Hundreds of thousands of children were killed, wounded, or orphaned during the war.  In central and northern Italy, when the war ended local citizens began to rebuild their homes, schools, churches, hospitals, and public spaces.  With no money, few jobs, and a countryside littered with the materiel of war, citizens banded together and literally recycled the abandoned tanks, trucks, and military outposts into new public facilities.  Especially in the region of Emilia-Romagna, groups of citizens built new centers expressly for the youngest children of the community.  These centers would not only assure that the children were well cared for and had access to early education, they would also be concrete manifestations of the shared sense of responsibility in the community for the education of its bambini.  Brick by brick, or mattone a mattone as the title of a history of these projects puts it, citizens built out of the rubble of war what have since been recognized as the most advanced, highest quality early childhood programs in the world.  One might say that they were turning swords into plowshares.  Men and women who had resisted Mussolini’s fascism and thuggery now were reconstructing their society in the name of democratic values and the education of children.  For me, this story is a powerful demonstration of the resilience of communities committed to democratic participation, in which each individual takes responsibility for the well-being of the whole.  The ideals and courage of the Italian resistance were transformed into acts of democratic renewal, and education was seen as the first step toward that end.

The second story takes place much later, in the late 1990’s, in the town of Reggio Emilia.  Reggio Emilia is the regional seat of Emilia-Romagna, and it is known for its strong resistance culture during the Mussolini years.  It has also been recognized for its world renowned municipal early education programs created in the years after the War.  Reggio Emilia has the highest level of citizen participation in community life I have every witnessed.  In his 1993 book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Robert Putnam cites the region of Emilia-Romagna for having the highest levels of citizen participation in Italy in such activities as electoral voting, volunteering in charitable and civic organizations, and the creation of social governance structures both within and outside of municipal offices.  In 1997, leaders of the infant and preschool centers in Reggio Emilia, in collaboration with local government officials, organized a year-long city-wide dialogue on “the questions of education today,” or le domande dell’educare oggi.  This experience was described by one program leader as a “journey of reflection” in which all citizens were invited to come to a series of small and large dialogues throughout the year, where a wide range of questions were considered about the purposes, means, challenges, benefits, values, and forms of education.  Here was an entire community asking itself the most fundamental questions about education, in concert with elected officials, and grounded in the efforts of those who educate and care for its youngest citizens.  Remember that the Italian verb educare is not about teaching, but about raising young children well, with care.  The city-wide dialogue helped to create a shared understanding among the citizens of Reggio Emilia about what is most important for children to learn, how learning should be organized and supported, and why the public should make this considerable investment.  In fact, expenditures on the infant and preschool programs in Reggio Emilia at the time accounted for 12 percent of the annual total municipal budget.

Imagine.

So what I saw in northern Italy, and particularly in Reggio Emilia, was that high levels of citizen participation can be correlated with a shared sense of responsibility for the education of young people.  And when that occurs, there seem to be richer, or what Benjamin Barber calls thicker, forms of democratic practice.  Citizens do not simply elect representatives to act on their behalf.  Rather, they become engaged themselves, frequently and over extended periods of time, to determine how their communities will function.  I saw grandfathers and teenagers and young mothers and laborers and well-tailored business men all come together to discuss the questions of education today and how that concern should be reflected in the schools of the community.  In this case, education was truly the midwife of democracy.  This reality was summed up for me when I read the large posters placed around the city prior to elections for the social councils that operate the early education programs.  Each poster, in addition to encouraging all citizens to vote for the members of the councils, declared that, Educazione vive in dialogo e partecipazione.  Education lives in dialogue and participation. 
I want to turn from these stories to two key values that underlie the link between democracy and education, and to the conditions necessary for realizing those values.  The first value is inclusion; the second is, as we have seen, participation.  By inclusion, I mean a commitment to making available to all citizens the resources, mechanisms, and goods associated with community life.   The value of inclusion holds that every citizen, regardless of an individual’s particular circumstances, has not only a right but a responsibility to be seen and heard—to be able to exercise a voice in decisions about how his or her community should be governed and to what ends.

We have seen this value mature in the US over the past 50 years through the civil rights movements associated with African-Americans, women, people with disabilities, gay and lesbian citizens, and others who have historically been disenfranchised in our society.  The value of inclusion has been affirmed by the US Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 and the Michigan decisions on affirmative action written by Sandra Day O’Conner in 2003.  In these cases and others, the Court has asserted that separate is inherently unequal and that, in the case of higher education, diversity provides a compelling benefit to the education of young men and women, providing a rationale for extraordinary efforts to recruit those who have been traditionally underrepresented in our colleges and universities.  That is, inclusion is a Constitutionally guaranteed right.  In a pluralistic democracy such as ours, this has direct consequences for educational systems expected to serve all citizens, not just those of a certain background or IQ level or economic status.  And, I would argue, it is not only a matter of being included but also of having a voice in how those systems operate, as we witnessed in Reggio Emilia.

The disability advocate and writer Norman Kunc, who was here on campus last month, has written that inclusion does not only imply being a member in a community—it also requires that one be a member of a community.  It is not enough to be merely physically present.  One must also be a fully participating member, an active citizen whose ideas are heard and respected, who takes responsibility for the welfare of others, and who understands how decisions affecting the whole are made and by whom.  This ethic of participation can only be fulfilled when the members of a community are informed, are capable of exercising moral judgment, and can weigh competing choices using available information.  This, in fact, is what I hope characterizes each of you who are graduating this month.  I hope that you will become active citizens who apply the knowledge, skills, and dispositions you have developed at UNH to participate fully in our diverse democracy.

Participation and inclusion are embodied in three documents that Vilmarie Sanchez and I ask our students to read in the first-year Inquiry course that we teach together.  The course is called, Be the Change You Wish to See:  Active Citizenship in a Multicultural World.  The students read the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and Barack Obama’s speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” delivered in March, 2008.  These three historical documents capture the ongoing democratic experiment that I referenced at the beginning of my talk.  The Seneca Falls Declaration essentially recasts the Declaration of Independence to include women as full citizens, over 70 years before women were finally given the right to vote.  Dr. King’s letter, famous for its expression of the duty to challenge unjust laws, reminds us that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”  And Barack Obama’s speech was a profound call to fulfill the ideals of American democracy.  He stated, “I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”

These ideals are at the core of what I mean by active citizenship.  Each of you being honored today has the opportunity and privilege to become an active citizen.  You have excelled in your studies, you have mastered one or more academic disciplines, and you have enrolled in a broad selection of general education classes in which you examined the world through multiple lenses.  Education has delivered you into a deeper understanding of yourself, your community, and your world.  Education has been your personal midwife into full adulthood and all that it implies.  As citizens in a democratic society, one that will continue to refine the ideals of inclusion and participation, and as members of a community of scholars, you are an embodiment of the inextricable link between democracy and education.  Wear this mantel well.  Live the ideals that Jefferson and King and Obama represent.  Set out to do good while you are doing well.   Participate in the civic life of your community, nation, and world.  Speak the truth to power; help others with less confident and valued voices do likewise.  And most of all, take your experience at UNH and pay it forward.  I wish you the best as you pursue a life of action, work, family, joy, and learning.  Peace be with you.