Congratulations to the U.S. on having created a president worthy, it seems, of our beautiful, outrageous democracy! Thank you citizens of the U.S. and of the world. May we all benefit from the coming President's work.
Barack Obama, family and advisers, appear to me to offer a new kind of maturity. I am wondering if we the people will be able to support and assist maturely in the rather daunting job of fixing many, many years of authoritarian leadership, including the government and the financial world.
Obama has a rare kind of intelligence and most of all he has worked in education. He has helped learners and communities of interest understand the art of inquiry, of mediation and of the creation of effective outcomes.
The field I have been long passionate in sharing is a form of inquiry called Cooperative Inquiry, created by John Heron (www.human-inquiry.com). CI at its best helps communities deal with power differentials, setting up a field for inquiry by small groups of 6 to 8 people. As Collaborative Inquiry, the method can deal with larger groups but my background and interest is in Cooperative Inquiry as it, in its purest form, helps the team of co-researchers, speak and act from not just the personal self but the greater self, the self connected to the greater field of consciousness, just as Barak Obama et al seem to do. As Obama has said, this election is not about him, it is about US. Indeed as a song says, We are the one's we have been waiting for.
Perhaps the quality of the U.S. these last 8 years that disturbs me most has been the seeming total support of authoritarian methods by those in power, in the military, industry and financial worlds. We have been led to believe that we should just believe that those in power make choices for the world because they know "what is best for all". With the world financial markets failing we now see what NOT participating, not understand and looking for a daddy with all the answers gets us: total collapse of many systems. (John Dean, a member of the Nixon regime woke up and he currently is fascinated about the authoritarian personality. I will leave it to you to Google him to read some of his research.)
Today, on Truthout (www.truthout.org) one of my favorite educators, Henry Giroux, writes about the rare opportunity we have with the Obama presidency if we are wise enough to participate maturely. That means in my view that we grow up as a country, that we learn how to challenge our leaders and to work together.
Giroux is a critical thinker, his field is not cooperative inquiry per se but his work points us in that direction. Here is a link to his Truthout article, Obama and the Promise of Education, asking whether we will use this time to become better democrats, with a small d. Will we move into power ourselves in mature effective ways? And here is a link to my site, to two pamphlets on education and on cooperative inquiry that I feel provide more material for growing up and learning to work together effectively.
Giroux concludes his article on this time of opportunity:
"One of the most important challenges, especially for educators, facing the US in a post-Bush period, is to take seriously the educational force of a culture that is central to constructing a new type of citizen. What is needed are citizens defined less through the hatred and bigotry of racism and the narrow obligations of consumerism than through the values, identities and social relations of a democratic society."
I agree. We have a rare time now to grow up, to become more aware of ourselves as social beings and most of all as citizens. Whether you use a method like Cooperative Inquiry or another method, here is to us all becoming more capable human beings for the sake of ourselves and our planet.
