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Telling Our Stories

​Imagine That …

5/9/2022

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“Some men see things as they are and ask why?
I dream things that never were, and ask why not?" 
​
Bobby Kennedy, 1968
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This May in the Core Virtues program we feature (for the first time) the virtue of “imagination” – the flight of fancy required to step outside the world we inhabit and form a new or different “image” of what the world could be.  Imagination can be used for good or evil but is a virtue when in service of a higher good (truth, goodness, or beauty). It remains the trait that unites great writers, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, engineers, artists, and just about anyone who asks bold, wildly speculative questions and comes up with answers. 
 
Could human beings fly? Might computers be made small enough to become personal devices? Could we produce enough food to feed 8 billion people?  Might we speak timeless truths of good and evil through a family of rabbits in the English countryside?  Or find them “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”? Or could we bring eighteenth-century triumphs to light using modern rap?  All of those questions, answered now in the affirmative, were daring dreams of the imagination just decades ago. The Wright brothers, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Norman Borlaug, Beatrix Potter, George Lucas, and Lin Manuel Miranda all share a root excellence:  imagination.
 
In each case, their imaginative work was grounded in a strong knowledge base.  Albert Einstein once famously said “imagination is more important than knowledge.”  Poet Derek Walcott observed that Einstein earned the right to say that, because he had spent much of his life accumulating a vast storehouse of knowledge upon which to apply his imagination. As had the Wright Brothers before him.  As did Steve Jobs and Lin Manuel Miranda after him. But we should still take Einstein’s point:  imagination creates steppingstones to new knowledge.
 
So how do we encourage children to use and enjoy their imaginations? First, continue to delight them with a strong knowledge base.  Wonder and imagination feast upon genuine understanding:  of the physical world, of the human past, of world literature, of mathematical truths, of the fine arts.  Children long to encounter real wonders and see the connections from different realms.
 
Second, in this busy world, parents should not forget that children need time for imaginative play.  Kids need unstructured time, outdoor time, and on-their-own time.  Free time to make up their games, to create their characters, and plan their projects – whether they are building a fort or exploring a stream or making a town of their own or going to a galaxy far, far away.  We need to resist the temptation to schedule every minute of a child’s day. 

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A third answer (and one that will not surprise readers of this site) is a steady diet of quality literature.  We can inspire at Morning Gathering by reading stories of those whose flights of fancy made them titans of imagination:  Da Vinci and Franklin, the Bronte sisters and the Wright Brothers, the inventor of crayons and the inventor of silk, Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin, Beatrix Potter and Wilson Bentley and so many more….  But more important still, let’s nurture children’s creativity and curiosity with literary works that transport them where we personally cannot escort them. Children who have, for example, enjoyed The Tales of Peter Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, The Trumpet of the Swan, A Wrinkle in Time, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are imbibing a heady draft of imaginative possibilities that nonetheless shed light on our world.
 
One of our favorite children’s authors, Madeleine L’Engle has written:  "A child who has been denied imaginative literature is likely to have far more difficulty in understanding cellular biology or post-Newtonian physics than the child whose imagination has already been stretched by reading fantasy and science fiction."  So take heart, all you parents and teachers whose students are lovers of science fiction and fantasy.
 
Let them “dream things that never were and ask why not”? 
 
Mary Beth Klee

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Forgiveness:  One Family’s Formation and Pursuit

4/5/2022

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On January 14, 2022, North Las Vegas police officer Nicholas Quintana answered a dispatch call that changed his life.  A child called 911 to report her parents fighting.  Then four shots announced a tragic end.  Twenty-seven-year-old Quintana, who was on his lunch break, felt “this abrupt urge” to answer the call, and he raced to the scene with other cops.   There they found not just a fatally shot man, but five children.  Police arrested the forty-year-old mother for killing her ex-husband. 

The couple’s children, ranging in ages from six to seventeen, were now without parents. “So, are they going to split us up?” one of the distraught children kept asking. Quintana felt he was there for a reason.  His own father had been killed by a relative when he was young.  He knew what it was like to be both fatherless, and to carry a toxic burden of hatred toward a family member who had been responsible. On the scene, as the youngest child wailed and the children anguished over their probable separate futures in child protective services, he confided to a fellow officer that he wanted to make a home for all five children.  He went home that night heavy-burdened.

Quintana and his twenty-six-year-old wife Amanda did not yet have children.  Nicholas shared his over-sized hope with his wife.  “Is this a dream?” she asked.  She was “understandably  … absolutely reluctant towards it… I was like ‘Well listen, hun, just meet the kids, just meet them, because you might fall in love with these kids. Just meet them.’”  They drove the next day to the city’s Child Haven, and hearts melted. “All of us?” the seventeen-year-old had asked wide-eyed, when Amanda and Nicholas proposed their plan.  “Every single one of you,” the Quintanas responded.  Two days later they were driving back to their three bedroom, two-bath home as a family of seven.  They were a new family, embarked on a challenging new journey. 

What motivates this largeness of heart?  Quintana speaks openly about feeling called to this, about wanting to be for the children the father they need and the one he never had.  He worries that he might fail because he had no modeling, but the experience of his father’s murder taught him an important lesson that he wants to share with the children.  He told them: “I want you to promise me that you’ll learn to forgive. It’s impossible to forget things…Especially things that hurt us the most,” but he found in his own life that he was released from the burden of toxic anger only when he could say “I don’t this hold against you anymore. I love you…That took a long time to happen, a while to happen.”  

The fact that it did happen, for him and for others, has huge ripple effects – many of them empirically verifiable. Twenty years of psychological research now supports Quintana’s conviction that forgiveness is freeing and conduces to human flourishing.  In study after study “spiritually motivated forgiveness” is linked to improved psychosocial wellbeing, mental health, and improved physical health outcomes.  It is linked to lower risk of depression.  Books with titles such as The Psychology of Forgiveness (M.E. McCullough, et al.; 2000), Forgiveness and Health (L.L. Toussaint, et al., 2015), The Handbook of Forgiveness (E.L. Worthington, et al.; 2020) and many others point to this virtue as a path to emotional and physical wellness. 
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There are no words to describe the sort of real-life heroism of Nicholas and Amanda Quintana.  This month, as Christians remember Jesus forgiving his own crucifiers from the cross, that is the lesson he wants to share with his children. And it’s not simply a religious one.

​Mary Beth Klee

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Feeling Their Pain in the Ukraine

3/3/2022

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Compassion is feeling the pain of others
and acting to end their distress.

Faithfulness is standing by those we love, those we serve,
and what we believe.

Mercy is showing compassion to the enemy, the wrongdoer,
​or those over whom one has power.

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Our March virtues have special resonance in March 2022.  What do compassion, faithfulness, and mercy mean when a small, free nation suffers an unprovoked invasion by its aggressor neighbor? The world watches in horror as Ukrainian civilians flee Russian bombs, missiles, and tanks. Rockets level not only centuries-old municipal buildings but opera houses and concert halls. They strike a maternity clinic, the Holocaust Memorial, orphanages, and schools. Women and children separate from husbands and fathers who remain to defend their homeland.  More than a million refugees surge across Ukraine’s borders as their cities fall, and a forty-mile enemy military caravan snakes toward their capital. 

What do we teach our children as our hearts are breaking? First, we should not ignore this moment in history.  We should speak with our young students about dictators and thugs who use their power to enslave others. Assuring them that we ourselves are not in peril at this moment, we should reflect that there are those who regard compassion and mercy as weaknesses. Students in Core Knowledge schools or in classical schools, students who study history, realize that this theme (conquest, tyranny) is not new.  They have met Rameses II, Qin Shi Huang Di, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler, and Josef Stalin. And there are many more.

Many adults in the post-World War II West have come to regard international peace as our right and the norm, but the last eighty years have been a fortunate historical anomaly.  History teaches that there are always dictators among us. When unchecked, they re-emerge to teach us that freedom isn’t free. Oppression characterizes history more often than liberty. So go ahead: get out a map and talk to students about this moment when liberty is in peril.  It’s a lesson worth teaching the young.

But how do we channel and allay children’s (and our own) fear and helplessness in the face of international affairs few of us control?  If you are a person or a school of faith, the indisputable first answer is prayer.  But for any person or school, part of the answer is in figuring out how – in their adult life and in the present—they can become helpers.

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That’s not easy or quick but here are some ideas.  Children should be encouraged to study history and especially the biographies of those who stood up to the bullies.  In May, our Heroes page spotlighted the biographies of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the trans-Atlantic team who orchestrated the defeat of Nazism and one of the world’s worst tyrannies.  Or study the work of Irena Sendler. Or the life of Nelson Mandela.  And what about David and Goliath? Send children the message that history can go either way; that by preparing themselves to lead lives of compassion, courage, and principle, they will be prepared to stand up to the bullies who inevitably come their way.

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To the extent that children themselves want to become helpers, encourage responsible ways to assist.  Children in one school in Maryland are writing letters to children in a sister school in the western Ukraine, electronic letters of support, assuring them of their friendship and sympathy, telling them about their days, sending their thoughts and prayers.  They are offering a branch of compassion and friendship and normalcy in a time of chaos.

Point out to kids that acts of great evil, cruelty, and harm, often elicit the best from others: new depths of compassion and mercy.  One thinks of the American experience of 9-11, and all those who raced to assist. (See our September 9-11 Heroes.) Right now, Poland has opened its borders to nearly 800,000 refugees, and not passively.  Tens of thousands of volunteers from around that country and the world – people who did not know each other before March 1-- have come to that border to assist. And they can use our assistance.

If a school wishes to raise funds to help the 400,000 endangered children, international relief efforts are mobilizing.  Doctors Without Borders already has medical teams on the ground.  The UN World Food Program has organized for Ukrainian Emergency relief.  Caritas Ukraine, which is supported by Catholic Relief Services, and Save the Children are also on site already with medical supplies, food, water, and refugee support.  The appropriately named “Mercy Chefs” are sending food relief to Romanian and Polish border camps.

All these efforts will be make-shift and provisional, as we hope and pray for a miracle that saves the weaker nation from the stronger.  The international community is ultimately on the hook.  “Faithfulness is standing by those we love, those we serve, and what we believe.”  Will we? 

Mary Beth Klee

Since this blog was posted two weeks ago, more than three million refugees have fled Ukraine during an unabated Russian attack.
​
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Love of Country: McCullough Tells Our Nation’s Stories

2/14/2022

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American historian David McCullough is fond of closing commencement remarks by challenging students to “do something for your country.”   He invokes the spirit of John F. Kennedy, Jr., whose 1960 inaugural address urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” 
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In an age when we are increasingly encouraged to consider ourselves “citizens of the world,” and when many elementary school curricula include units on “global citizenship,” how relevant is love of country anymore? McCullough, who has dedicated a lifetime to telling America’s stories, would say: very.  We are still a planet of sovereign nation-states – 195 of them by last count.  We pass our laws, inherit our mores, formulate our aspirations, shape our futures, and realize our daily potential in the context of a national framework and heritage.  We flounder or flourish in that context, and ours is worth knowing. 

McCullough has worked for over five decades to reveal America to herself.  Indeed, in 1968, when Simon and Garfunkel “walked off to look for America,” so did McCullough, publishing his first major work, The Johnstown Flood. With drama, suspense, and a storyteller’s compass, McCullough told the tale of the nation’s worst flood disaster and introduced a new genre:  narrative non-fiction.  His novel-like read was spectacularly successful, spotlighting the foibles, missteps, heroism, and lessons to be learned, as well as earning him accolades as the nation’s leading social historian.  (Much to the chagrin of academic historians.)

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In the years that followed McCullough told less horrific and equally riveting stories. He wrote about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal.  Those epic undertakings were not accounts of infrastructure so much as tales of driven, idealistic, relentlessly persevering, and sometimes misguided people.  McCullough is quick to emphasize that: “history is the story of people” not abstract forces. And so, in the 1980s, his own work turned to biography.  He chronicled the life of the irrepressible Teddy Roosevelt in Mornings on Horseback, then went on to tell rich and neglected stories of John Adams, Harry Truman, and the improbable triumph of The Wright Brothers.  

In the past two decades no major movement in American history seems to have escaped his lens.  He has written on the American Revolution, the early pioneer experience and how it projected the American Revolution into the west, and on World War II.  A capstone book of his essays (many of them commencement speeches) were collected in his volume, The American Spirit.

So, how does he characterize that spirit?  What’s to love?  The editors of Time Magazine asked him that in 2017.  Was America in any way exceptional?  Should kids be taught that?

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“I think America has come further in giving opportunity to the best that’s in human nature than any other country ever in history, and we seem to be holding on for over 200 years already. We’ve greatly improved the inequalities and the shortcomings of our way of life as we’ve moved forward.”  He didn’t end there. “One of the things I feel is that we are a country of good people. We are a country of well-meaning, hard-working, conscientious people — 90% of us. And we are blessed with progress in a number of fields today, the likes of which no people on Earth have ever enjoyed in all of history.” He pointed to progress in medicine, in the opportunity for education, and in the quest for equality itself.  America is a can-do nation, and as long as we educate our children in the nation’s stories, “I am optimistic,” said he. 

The key is to educate our children in the nation’s stories.  Martin Luther King Jr. knew them and loved them, and it made him a powerful agent for change. “History is an antidote to the hubris of the present. History should be a lesson that produces immense gratitude for all those who went before us." When McCullough points out that “there are still more public libraries in this country than Starbucks,” he affirms his fundamental optimism about the American experiment.

We still have lots to be optimistic about.  In the past three weeks my husband and I have been traveling by car up and down the east coast – “all come to look for America.”  If you travel from Anne Hutchinson’s Portsmouth, Rhode Island to the Founders’ Philadelphia to the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk, then on to guess who’s Jacksonville, and come back through George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, you’ll be mightily impressed too.  Of course, you’ll be impressed by the stories of all those titans of the American past, but not incidentally by the people you meet working in each location in each city each day.

Americans of all races, genders, and ethnicities are ploughing ahead (like Washington at Mount Vernon) with pretty good humor.  They’re keeping their heads down as we close out this pandemic, and they’re fed up with restrictions.  But everywhere you go, one meets hard-working, conscientious, decent, and fundamentally positive people, who truly live out the ideals of liberty and justice for all. 

The African American manager at the Hampton Inn in Alexandria, Virginia—when I told him I was from Rhode Island—pointed out to my delight that we were practically family because his aunt was from Rhode Island too, and wasn’t it great that Viola Davis got her start there? I practically hugged him.  (But then again, there was an acrylic placard between us.) Still, our nation’s Home Away from Home (the Hampton Inn in Asheville NC), neatly sums up the national creed on the placard in its halls: “Today is going to be amazing!”  Ya gotta love it.
​
Go ahead and teach the kids:  love your country.  Do something for your country.
 
Mary Beth Klee

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​Courage to Continue

1/6/2022

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“It is the courage to continue that counts.”  Winston Churchill’s words, which we feature on the home page this month, resonate in this third year of the pandemic. 

We often associate courage with the spirit of adventure:  daring deeds, doggedly pursued.  Homeric seas braved, majestic mountains climbed, icy lands breached.  We are agog with admiration for the intrepid explorers of land and space, who conquer fear and danger in pursuit of a great dream. The “spirit of adventure,” Sir Edmund Hillary noted, was a chief motivator for him and for his Sherpa friend Tenzing Norgay, when they summited Mount Everest in 1953. It’s that hard to define combination of wonder, drive, desire to experience first-hand, and hopefully be FIRST. It helped the mountaineers move beyond fear “to venture and persevere.”

Sometimes the will to act courageously springs from the pursuit of an ideal too precious to be surrendered.  Freedom and love of country inspired George Washington and American troops at Valley Forge, Winston Churchill and the British people during World War II, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag.  Religious conviction motivated Quaker safe houses on the Underground Railroad and workers’ rights advocate Dorothy Day and Nazi critic Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Human dignity and racial equality motivated Martin Luther King Jr. from a Birmingham jail, and Nelson Mandela imprisoned for decades in South Africa.

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Whether spurred by the spirit of adventure or the pursuit of an ideal, we are often able to exercise courage when something meaningful rallies us to move beyond fear. But what about when courage is required simply “to continue,” as Churchill had it?

The pandemic affords us a new opportunity to exercise courage:  courage to go into the classroom, courage to go the grocery store, courage to go to a doctor’s appointment, courage to get on a bus or an airplane….  We look at this January 2022 Courage List and are tempted to laugh out loud.  Or shake our heads.  This is a Baby Courage List.   But so be it. 

Let’s take our baby steps and do (as Eleanor Roosevelt suggested) one thing that scares us every day.   Let the spirit of adventure take us to a restaurant.  Let the pursuit of an ideal lead us back to church or synagogue or the classroom or the theater or the museum.  Let the will to live well triumph over the temptation to cower.  And let the words of Henry Ford inspire us as we continue an uphill slog: “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”   
​
Mary Beth Klee

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December Journeys with Our Fellow Travelers

12/7/2021

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​When the Ghost of Jacob Marley appeared to Scrooge on that eerie Christmas Eve, the frightened miser noted that he could see right through him, from his waistcoat to his back – he “had no bowels.”   
What?   The contemporary reader comes to a full stop at that line, but in the nineteenth century the meaning was clear:   bowels were the organ associated with compassion and empathy.  Much as we would use “heart” today.  And in his three spectral journeys, Scrooge travels through the bowels of time to sharpen his vision of Christmas Past, Present and Future, and to grow in love for those in need.

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Charles Dickens’ nineteenth century classic A Christmas Carol remains an admonition to stay alert to the plight of fellow travelers on the road of life.  It is ever useful because then as now, we tend to wear social blinders or get stuck in our lanes.  Depending on our neighborhood or profession, those in need may be nearly invisible to us.  We may see right through them – or past them.  Just as those original Christmas travelers, Mary and Joseph, were invisible to the innkeepers who had a full house.
 
In this season when we try to sharpen our vision and fortify our bowels, let’s consider assisting some of the literal travelers on the road of life:  Afghan refugees.  Since our country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands have fled the Taliban and sought refuge here and abroad.  In my home state of little Rhode Island, we are welcoming 250 Afghanis (mostly families), and though there was no “Afghan community” here to speak of before the August crisis, there is now.  That’s thanks to the work of Dorcas International, a nonsectarian outreach group, which has dedicated itself to refugee resettlement, and making a home for the stranger. 

Afghani refugees are grateful.  Former US interpreter for the armed forces Amin Faqiri, arrived in Providence with his family in October, and says with a big smile, “I am starting over, like a newborn baby.”  In many ways, it’s the best time ever to be an immigrant.  Restaurants are desperate for staff.  Manufacturing plants need workers.  Construction sites seek carpenters.  Groups like Dorcas International try to position these legally admitted newcomers for success in their new homeland.  With both a professional staff and LOTS of volunteers, they arrange for apartments, for English language classes, for vocational training in carpentry and the trades, enrollment of children in schools, and family assistance with grocery shopping, as the newcomers get their feet on the ground.  The needs are immense, but the folks from Dorcas and many other non-profit and church groups are there to welcome the “poor, tired, and hungry yearning to breathe free.”

But what about the poor, tired, and hungry who are here on our own shores already?  The everyday Americans, who often, because of bad fortune or drug addiction or alcohol or mental illness or domestic abuse have lost their way and are on the streets?  We cannot walk through our cities without being aware of the homeless:  folks with their carts and their pets, with a pleading sign, and a hand extended.  Nearly half a million of our fellow countrymen are homeless. On the Core Virtues site, we’ve featured the slender middle school novel Stay (by Bobby Pyron), which shines a light on those who live in Emergency Shelters and/or public parks.  And we feature some moving picture books as well.  When addressing the problem of homelessness, there are state and federal initiatives to be sure, but the national tradition of voluntarism and what used to be called “benevolent institutions” is still active and a way to extend a hand.  This is the time of year to support the work of non-profit, non-partisan groups like the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Salvation Army.  Our personal contributions and turning the attention of our students to those these groups serve is a way to keep the spirit of the holidays.
​
The holidays are a time “when Want is keenly felt and Abundance rejoices,” two bell ringers tell Scrooge.  His “bah-humbug” echoes in our ears.  But the miser became a changed man following that Christmas Eve journey, and it was always said “that he knew how to keep Christmas well.”  May we too know how to keep the spirit of the holidays well even beyond the holidays. 

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Gratitude Connects Us

11/9/2021

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​Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, and if we didn’t have it because of 1621, Squanto, the Pilgrims, Sarah Buell Hale, and Abraham Lincoln, we’d have to (re)invent it. Because that fourth Thursday in November grounds us in a higher reality and builds bonds of community. Thanksgiving reminds each one of us that we are not uniquely responsible for our own accomplishments and successes.  That we are helped along the way by others.  That we are the humble recipients of many gifts freely given, and that we are connected in a great web of giving to each other.  And all that inspires affection, awe, joy, and thankfulness.  

To see how innately human this desire to express gratitude is, just watch this wondrous clip of a toddler hearing a violin for the first time.    Then watch it again, and again, and again. 

So much in our daily lives turns us in upon ourselves as each undertakes “the pursuit of happiness.” Ours is a seagull society – one in which “me-me-me” is the shrill cry heard from all sides. The iconic American essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau urged their readers to “insist on yourself; never imitate” and be alert to “a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears.”  Modern gurus encourage contemporary pilgrims to shun ties that bind and “seek your bliss.”  

In rebuke, stands our annual day of Thanksgiving – which recalls both an extraordinary historical event of fellowship four hundred years ago and the deeply human need to give thanks. In that fall of 1621 English settlers and native people celebrated their shared endeavor of the harvest with some ninety Wampanoags and their King Massasoit joining Pilgrim settlers "that we might after a more special manner rejoice together." 

On this four hundredth anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, our primary focus with elementary school children should not be on historical irony that breeds cynicism (“Wampanoags Regret Helping Pilgrims”), but on how each of us is lifted up, bound, and made part of something larger by giving thanks.  

Mary Beth Klee  

For more reflections on the importance of gratitude as an attitude,  read Robert Emmons, the world’s leading expert on gratitude here. 

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Perseverance Across the Sands of Time

10/7/2021

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How did we get here?  That musing, which goes right to the heart of the human search for meaning, became an increasingly literal question last month.  How did we human beings get here – to the American continents? 
 
For more than a century, scientists have speculated that when massive ice sheets began to melt at the end of the last Ice Age (c. 20,000 years ago) humans crossed a newly exposed land bridge in pursuit of their animal prey.  They migrated from Eurasia to the Americas and eventually peopled the northern and southern continents.  Settlement took time, and humans were not imagined to be in the Americas more than thirteen thousand years ago.  But that date has been under fire.  And last month some hauntingly well-preserved footprints in White Sands, New Mexico and some dogged researchers threw all that into doubt.

The Journal of Science reported that a rich array of human tracks uncovered in the White Sands National Park have now been dated to 21,000-23,000 years ago.  The process of documentation was painstaking and the supporting evidence impressive. Yet glacial ice-sheets would still have covered the North American crossing at that point.  So, were humans already in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age? It sure looks like it, according to lead geologist Michael Bennett and the fifteen co-authors of the blockbuster study. Two thousand years before.
 
The White Sands findings are stunning because the tracks are so undeniably human, so numerous, and have lent themselves to scrupulous radiocarbon dating protocols.  Their discovery comes on the heels of earlier discoveries that hinted at human settlement long before thirteen thousand years ago in Mexico and as far south as Chile.  So, did humans find little known land routes from Eurasia to America before an ice wall closed off the two continents? Or was the land bridge itself exposed thirty thousand years ago, and might hunter humans have crossed before a wall of ice separated the continents?  Or did early humans come by sea? The new findings open new mysteries.  A paradigm shift is underway. ​

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PictureMichael Bennett; Photo credit: Bournemouth University
​This moment and these findings have something to teach us about intellectual virtue and the nature of science. Some very tenacious researchers at White Sands had literally been digging in these dunes for decades when the new prints were exposed.  The geologists who uncovered them had been over this region a dozen times before, seeking, wondering.  But one day in 2019 high winds literally turned back the sands of time, and tireless British geologist Michael Bennett along with White Sands Park Director David Bustos beheld a different landscape.  Exposed in the bluff were undeniably human footprints fading into a mound of sand.  The two held their breath and forged forward. Gentle scraping exposed outlines of a buried track. “At that point,” Bennett recalled, “we said Bingo, we’ve got it.”
​
White Sands had been on geologists’ radar since the 1930s, when a twenty-two-inch footprint thought to be the mythical “Bigfoot,” was discovered there.  The remarkable print turned out to be a giant ground sloth, and in subsequent years ancient human and extinct animal prints were discovered nearby, dating to perhaps ten thousand years ago.  Maybe more… But radiocarbon dating is a tricky business and requires seed samples from above and below the imprints, from which the age can be calculated.  Many tracks are better than one. That’s why the 2019 discovery is breathtaking.

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Photo credit: David Bustos
In the eighteen months after their discovery, Bennett and Bustos assembled a team of geologists, archaeologists, geophysicists, and dating experts to both dig and date.  Using exquisite care, they uncovered eight separate “horizons of footprints,” sixty-one prints in all by as many as sixteen people, mostly teens and children, they believe.  National Geographic reports, “Multiple track layers were bookended above and below by layers of sediment containing seeds from the Ruppia grass” which formerly grew in the area.
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The dating of seeds above and below the prints suggests humans and animals tramped here between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago.  “We’ve really tried to prove it’s not that old, and we keep coming up dry,” Daniel Odess, archaeologist and one of the authors of the study reports.  Layer after layer of track yields the same data.  Wow.  
 
Of course, caution should prevail.  Is there anything “off” about these radiocarbon dating results?  Can a second method of dating be found?  Or do these new findings constitute a body of evidence so overwhelming that it’s time to alter former theories? We don’t know yet, and I am a student of history not science, but I’m betting on a paradigm shift.  And that will challenge teachers.
​

For almost three decades first graders in Core Knowledge Schools across the country --and high schoolers everywhere--have been learning that human settlement in the Americas dates to the end of the last Ice Age. I personally wrote and recorded song a called “Back in the Ice Age” that hundreds of former Crossroads Academy students can sing.  It has the lyrics “Back in the Ice Age, twenty thousand years ago…woolly mammoths crossed the land bridge with hunters close behind, from Asia to America, a new world they did find, back in the Ice Age.” Now what? Maybe I just change the lyrics to “Before the ice froze, thirty thousand years ago….”

In October the Core Virtues program spotlights the virtues of diligence and perseverance.  Those are indispensable intellectual excellences: care in our work, pressing on despite difficulty.  My hat is off to the tenacious team of international researchers at White Sands, who worked assiduously and never gave up on an elusive quest.  Well done, noble scholars!  And I tip my hat too to the 22,000-year-old teens and kids, who left their mark, perhaps drawing water for their folks at the now extinct “Lake Otero,” where the prints remain.
 
And let’s not forget to spotlight two other intellectual virtues these scientists displayed, ones that are also cultivated at Core Virtues Schools:  openness to inquiry and humility in the face of facts.  Those traits are key to the progress of knowledge in general and science in particular.  
 
Scientists construct theories (or “paradigms”) of what happened in accord with the most reliable data they have.  For years, it has seemed from dating of glacial moraines, ice cores, human remains and artifacts that a post-Ice Age crossing was the most likely explanation of human settlement in the Americas.  But that is a theory, not a fact. 
 
And science is a process.  New evidence hinted the theory might be incorrect, and an intrepid few researchers were open to questioning how “settled” the science was.  They didn’t shy away from research that might yield pre-thirteen-thousand-year-old results.  Colorado geologist Thomas Stafford notes that it has not been common scientific practice to think past that date.  As a radiocarbon dating expert, he would often receive samples to date and be told not to bother looking past the thirteen-thousand-year material. “If you’re not looking for anything, you’re not going to find it,” Stafford says.  
 
Openness to inquiry must guide intellectual endeavor.  When advocates for various theories and policies proclaim, “the science is settled,” all our alarm bells should go off. On highly complex issues, the science is hardly ever “settled.”  Ask Copernicus.  Ask Galileo.  Ask Einstein. Ask Michael Bennett.  Nature surprises us, and our understanding evolves. We have to be humble enough to allow that evolution -- admit that we might not know it all.
 
Meanwhile, what do we teach those first graders and high school students about how human beings came to inhabit the Americas?  Maybe we say: 
 
Well, it was a very long time ago, and because we don’t have written records and our scientists are literally still digging, we don’t know for sure.  But here’s what we think.  Early human hunters probably crossed from Asia to America at a time when that area wasn’t covered with ice.  That could have been before the last Ice Age.  We used to think we humans came at the end of the Ice Age, but now we’re not sure because of evidence found in our own national park at White Sands, New Mexico.  Maybe you can help solve that puzzle if you become an archaeologist or geologist. 
 
And teachers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to tell students they should learn some lessons from those Ice Age youth.  When your parents tell you to take your little brother or sister and go do something, just do it.  Leave a legacy…..
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Courtesy of Karen Carr and the National Park Service
​Mary Beth Klee, Ph.D. has taught the Ice Age unit to first graders numerous times and now needs to regroup.
 
The Bennett, et. al. study is at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586 and the National Geographic article at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/fossil-footprints-challenge-theory-when-people-first-arrived-americas. And for another thought-provoking challenge to a realm in which “the science is settled,” read New York University physicist and Obama Under Secretary of Energy Steven Koonin’s latest work Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters. (April 2021)
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Respect in the Time of Covid

9/3/2021

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As children return to school this fall – in the time of Covid – teachers once again attempt to cultivate the virtue of respect.  Every year in Core Virtues schools, our September focus is on treating others with high regard -- regardless of their race, creed, ethnicity, age, economic circumstance, physical disability, or anything else.  In past years it seemed easier to model respect as a self-evident human excellence. Most teachers love teaching kids to see beyond genetic attributes or economic circumstances.  We love the stirring picture books that encourage children to focus on the real person, disregarding externals.  The picture books we feature in September -- Strictly No Elephants or Carla’s Sandwich -- make the point, celebrating individual essence and even quirkiness. 
 
But in the time of Covid, respect for others—particularly for their choices, their thoughts, their intentions—is hard to cultivate.   The pandemic has afforded a new gift and challenge.  How do we cultivate respect for those who have different ideas?  What if I believe that your ideas and choices endanger my health?  Or what if you believe that my ideas and choices imperil normal child development and even education?  How do we stave off mutual contempt?  For contempt is the sworn enemy of respect.
 
The challenge is daunting, particularly regarding masks in schools.  This year, in schools where masks are required, teachers will have to interact respectfully with parents (and students) who find the mandate injurious to their children’s education and to civil liberty.  In schools where masks are optional, teachers will have to deal respectfully with parents (and students) who find the choice to unmask irresponsible and a threat to their health.  Teachers will have to model respect for both choices as legitimate, keeping their opinions to themselves. 
 
That’s very hard.  But there has never been a better opportunity to practice what we preach:  respect for dignity of the human person in all our diversity – even (and especially) diversity of thought, point of view. 
 
Perhaps one virtue that will help us model that respect is humility.  We are living in complex (and as we’ve been told repeatedly) unprecedented times.  Our death toll (as a percentage of the population) does not yet rival the bubonic plague.  But we are surpassing 1918 mortality rates, and in new territory with this extended, morphing international disease.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  We’re not sure of the evolution of this disease, and we’re not even sure of the long-term effects of our choices.  There are no “twenty years out” studies.  The only thing we know for sure is that much of what we currently believe will turn out to be incorrect. That has been the case historically for medical practices, pandemics, and public health.
 
So, rather than demonizing the other, let’s practice listening to those with different views. We might learn something.  If not, let's practice saying: “Thank you for helping me understand your thinking on this.  I’m not in the same place, but I'm grateful you shared that point of view."

​The novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, had a cult following.  It’s time for a new novel:   Respect in the Time of Covid.  

​Mary Beth Klee, Ph.D.

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Lincoln: July Fourth Should Bring Us Together

7/12/2021

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Author of the recently published novel, Old Abe, John Cribb (Core Virtues Foundation Trustee) offered the following reflections on America's Independence Day at RealClearPolitics.com on July 4, 2021.

In five years, on July 4, 2026, Americans will observe the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, a milestone that carries a somewhat awkward name: the semiquincentennial.

Those old enough to remember our nation’s 200th birthday in 1976 know the bicentennial was a months-long celebration full of parades, fireworks, and tall ships. The country had recently struggled through the Vietnam War, Watergate, recession, and an energy crisis, but Americans came together to pay tribute to the American Revolution.
 
As Gerald Ford observed in Philadelphia on Independence Day 1976, it was a time for “both pride and humility, rejoicing and reverence,” a day to reflect that, for our nation’s founders, “when liberty was at stake, they were willing to pay the price.”

If we don’t watch it, we may be headed toward something quite different in 2026. The last few years have brought arguments that the American founding wasn’t so great after all and that the founders were just a bunch of old white men who talked about freedom but instituted slavery and racism.

Some students are being taught that the real founding was not 1776 but 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia. A National Archives task force recently cited the Archives’ own rotunda, where the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and other founding documents are displayed, as an example of “structural racism.”
 
If this line of thinking wins the day, 2026 will be a year-long scowling at America’s past. That would be wrong, not only because our country deserves better, but because a nation that learns to loathe itself is in deep trouble.

What to do? Abraham Lincoln offered some excellent guidance in a speech he gave in Chicago in July 1858, just a few weeks before the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. He used the occasion to give his thoughts on the founding, the Declaration of Independence, and the importance of celebrating July Fourth.

Lincoln never hesitated to address head-on the issue of slavery and the founding. He explained that the founders knew slavery was wrong, but they did not believe they could fight a war against one of the greatest military powers on earth, launch a new nation, hold 13 new states together, and get rid of slavery all at the same time. It was too large a task.

What they could and did do, however, was lay down principles in the Declaration of Independence that spelled the doom of slavery—the ideals that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The declaration of those principles, coming at a time when the vast majority of people on earth lived with little or no freedom, was a magnificent step forward. For the first time in history, a nation was created out of the idea that all should be free and govern themselves.

Those founding principles were a promise. They stood, and still stand, as beacons for the country to move toward.

In one sense, the founding was thus tragically flawed by slavery. In another sense, it was the glorious start of a long journey that has brought hope and freedom to millions.

Lincoln knew the founders were far from perfect, but he also knew they were an extraordinary generation of leaders, perhaps the most extraordinary in history. He called them “iron men” and saw much to admire in them.

He pointed out that few of us are descended by blood from those founders, but we are all their descendants in that we have inherited the ideals they fought for. “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together,” Lincoln said, “that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

Lincoln knew Fourth of July celebrations are part of the glue that holds us together. They remind us of how difficult it was to establish the principles underlying our democracy and win the liberty we enjoy. They help us, Lincoln said, “feel more attached to one another, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit.”

In other words, the Fourth of July builds patriotism, love of country.

If they were here today, Abraham Lincoln and Jerry Ford would no doubt both say let’s have a grand semiquincentennial party in 2026. And they would no doubt push back hard against the idea that the American founding was anything but a miracle.

Americans need to do the same in their children’s schools, on college campuses, in town halls and in legislatures. We need to push back hard against the narrative that America’s history is mainly a story of racism and oppression.

Despite its faults and sins—and some of them, like slavery, have been grave—the American record stands tall. It is a brilliant, unparalleled story.

It is still true, as Gerald Ford said on Independence Day 1976, that “the United States today remains the most successful realization of humanity's universal hope.”

Five years from now, let’s come together for a joyful 250th birthday celebration full of patriotism and pride. We can start by lighting a candle this Fourth of July and remembering just how blessed we all are to live here.

John Cribb is the author of “Old Abe: A Novel,” published by Republic Books.

This article was published July 4, 2021 on realclearpolitics.com

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