I still haven't figured out how to use ONet! I knew that I had written my post that's here, but couldn't remember where it was when I was looking for it. Today I checked my profile and noticed "Deep Community" and wondered what that was all about--D'oh!

Sadly,what I wrote doesn't makes much sense. Linda's question: "How do we measure progress in this work so that we know what needs to be tweeked when?" is so important . And in my scattered way I was trying to unpack the construct of "progress."

This is the part of Linda's post that caught my attention:

"It is about understanding how everything is interconnected - what happens to you, changes what happens to me; what you do to nature changes nature on the other side of the globe. Good concepts I think but not your typical "kid" mentality.

Where do we learn abut those concepts? Where do we learn good and bad and right and wrong? Mostly, I think (I think a lot these days and realize how little I know.), we learn them from our families. From those people who have gone ahead of us and experienced more and hopefully developed some wisdom. Sometimes those families are extended - sometimes all the way to a community - but that part is seldom recognized. How do we have children teaching values when they have little experience with living and no remaining role models?"

I mentioned values clarification because I think understanding values as a process is a better way of imagining how values are formed than is the construct of role models.

I don't know; I'm not there, never traveled to Uganda, but my opinion is that the kids have a map in their minds of their community. They are very facile with the map because in their hearts they know they should be represented, yet what they feel most is an absence of their representation.

David gets at this about kids in a different context: "I'm trying to point to is the isolation of child-headed households and the need for them to be more than simply consulted about the community."

Something that's probably obvious about me, especially to David and Linda, is that I have a hard time keeping things straight. I know that and wonder why that is? In this case I was thinking of the situation of former child soldiers and their isolation. I was thinking about an individual and the relationship to the broader community and the relationship between the two is what seemed so hard to keep straight.

One idea about values is they are something the community shares and which are transfered by modeling and punishments to kids. But in this case the war has caused a tremendous rent in fabric of the community, in some ways the community values are disordered and in disrepair. So where does that leave the former child soldiers and what of the community? That's not how Linda asked these sorts of questions, but sort of a paraphrase I was using to understand her questions.

Two points I wanted to make were: 1) Kids are not passive vessels to receive values. Rather I think it better to understand that personal values come from a process of valuing. 2) The active process of valuing as an individual is influenced by society in general, and in turn influences community values.

Joining those two points together the bigger point is to notice that values aren't a thing poured into people's heads.

The still larger vision of a "change in perception" that Buddhist economics entails seems global in it's implications.

So there's individuals, their community, the world community all involved with perceptions and changes of perception, and I'm not keeping things straight; especially as it regards the issue of measurement of progress.

And she talks about Participatory Action Research, "instead of looking at a path that is a straight line from A to Z with all of the intermediate (B,C,D....) questions to be answered, it is more like wandering around in a spiral."

That bit about the spiral shape got me thinking about logical typing.

Gregory Bateson wrote quite a lot about logical typing (here's a brief article about Russell's Paradox that points to what's meant by logical types). There's a wonderful chapter in Bateson's book, "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" entitled "From Classification to Process."

I think Bateson is really important when it comes to thinking academically about social science. LOL the chapter seems important enough that I would actually type it out for you or get it to you in some way. I'll spare you now, but suggest that Bateson was onto something very important about how to keep complicated problems of hierarchies--individual, community world community--straight in studying.

Linda is concerned that the perception-change that's needed doesn't seem like "typical kid mentality." My hunch is these kids in question are perhaps closer to such a perception change as a result of the traumatic events of their experience than a middle-aged American like me is.

William Faulkner's line from "Requiem for a Nun": "The past is never dead. It's not even past." has always intrigued me. Partly that's because it's so often used in reference to the American South. I lived in the South moving in 1963 and then moving above the Mason Dixon line again in 1971--from ages 8-16 formative years. People outside the USA might not comprehend how the idea of the South is so strange and important in America. In any case the quote in context isn't about the South, but about an individual's relationship to the past.

Linda's post asks such deep and complicated questions. The theoretical aspects are so intriguing to me. Time is important to the paradigm that Bateson presents. Since my mind had wandered from the kids to the community, to the whole world, I thought to myself what about the universe? That's where the suggestion about Paul Davies came to mind. I did later find the article I was looking for but couldn't find. It really is a worthwhile interview that has a bit to say about keeping things straight in mind too.

Alas, I'm really far afield and the question: "How do we measure progress in this work so that we know what needs to be tweeked when?" seems so practical and straightforward.

What needs managing needs measuring. But does all that's really important here need managing? I'm reminded of the prayer for the courage to change the things we can, to accept the things we can't, and the wisdom to know the difference. Drucker is a very good teacher about management. What made him great, I think, was he was good at figuring out good ways of dealing with the things we can change while maintaining an abiding interest in and exploration of wisdom.

I flunked out of college the first time around, but the first item around got introduced to Drucker and management by objectives. After a long time I went back to college for the second time around to study elementary education. Lesson plans begin with behavioral objectives; they sounded really familiar to Drucker.

Naturally, education or pedagogy like any other field gets into its own strange loops and jargon. But contrary to reputation the the field asks fundamental questions and produces meaningful and insightful responses to them. Among the questions teachers ask is: "What are the best ways to establish meaning."

In education as business management behavioral objectives are favored in no small part for evaluation or testing. So after the lesson the student will name at least 40 of the 50 state capitals in America. The evaluation is simple: just listen to the student name them. In business the objectives are related to widgets. Of course what happens in the middle: the lesson on state capitals, or the making of widgets, is where the hard part lies.

In some ways Participatory Action Research seems a long ways away from Drucker's management by objectives. I don't think antithetical to it, but different.

Kieran Egan has some very insightful ideas about education. You can scan this brief introduction to imaginative education here One of Egan's books is "Teaching as Story Telling." It's intended for teaching in the elementary schools, but the model is quite simple and based on deep psychological insight. Story telling has shown up in business theory as well.

Some of the questions Linda raises are about management, and how people are accustomed to establishing meaning about management. Those conventions cannot be dispensed with. Egan is an "ivory tower" but he also knows most of his students will go into schools where conventions of discourse will need to be used too.

Bottom line: well, PAR and storytelling aren't what to get into when what the person really wants to know about are metrics. But most of the time what people really want to know is: "What's the story?"

Egan's model doesn't mean you have to throw everything else out. Nevertheless,I think the model might well be helpful in presenting Buddhist economics in many contexts. I also think the Story Form Model is a useful way to create ways of understanding and discussing the progress of the work of Opok Farms.

I suspect that Dr. Hurst is aware of Egan's work. Probably there's some differences too, but there's some fundamental similarities. The beauty of Egan's story telling model is that it's simple enough for even education students to get and the focus is on helping children establish meaning. The simplicity rocks. Egan's work maybe a way to connect Hurst's Deep Community to your presentations of Buddhist economics as well as sharing the experience of Opok Farms.