Fran Lynggaard Hansen, a Brattleboro native with deep connections to local history and to people everywhere, is a longtime Commons reporter and columnist.
SPRINGFIELD-I grew up on Marlboro Avenue in Brattleboro in the 1960s, one of upwards of 100 kids who lived around the Oak Grove School neighborhood.
Those were the days when you would play outside until dark, when your mother called you in for supper. In the summer we would play kick-the-can or hide-and-seek, or we'd build rafts across the pond at the foot of Wilson's Woods.
We'd organize neighborhood pick-up games of kickball and baseball on the playground. In the winter we'd fly down hills on sleds in the woods and build snow forts on the corners of our driveways with gangs of friends.
When we would get together as kids, we'd figure out our disputes ourselves, as adults weren't around to help. Sometimes we'd have arguments, and occasionally someone would go home angry for a while. But eventually they'd came back, because the fun the group was having would beat out the boredom of staying at home alone, angry.
We learned how to make our own fun and our own rules. We practiced the art of compromise and how to stand up for ourselves if we thought someone else wasn't playing fair.
At the end of most days, we remained friends. Our streets were run with our version of democracy.
* * *
Around 1980, something changed. Stranger danger came along. Missing kids' names started appearing on the sides of milk cartons.
When I graduated from college and began my work as a teacher, there weren't as many kids playing outside alone anymore. I noticed the differences at pick-up time at school: more buses, less walking, and a lot more arranged play dates instead of pick-up games of baseball in neighborhoods.
There were other changes. Our school bought a computer - a single computer - that was moved once a month from classroom to classroom. Only two nonviolent games were available at the time: Lemonade, a math game, and The Oregon Trail, a competition where the player's avatar would pretend to live in a covered wagon and would have to avoid hazards like dysentery, disease, and river crossings.
As families bought their own home computers and the video market took hold, I noticed even fewer interactions among kids in the neighborhood as they'd spend that time in front of screens, alone, playing the game online with their friends.
Concurrently, around that time many states dropped the civics requirement for graduation, in favor of the "three Rs" after President George W. Bush's signed his signature No Child Left Behind bill into law in 2002.
In civics class, students would learn how our government works, how laws are made, and the meaning of the articles and amendments to the Constitution, the document upon which our democratic government was founded almost 250 years ago.
I wondered at the time how kids were supposed to learn the specifics of our government without being specifically taught. I also wondered how that might affect how informed they'd be as voters when they'd turn 18.
While these educational modifications in our culture might not appear interrelated, I believe they are. Practicing which rules to play a game on a vacant lot has a lot to do with democracy. There are inevitable arguments, changes made based on the ideas of the group. The majority would always win, the losers would quickly learn to accept their fate, and then we'd quickly get back to the business of playing the game.
Those who disagreed sucked it up and played anyway, because hanging out with your friends was a lot more fun than being a sore loser.
* * *
Time marched on. I started noticing that when I set up a volleyball or badminton net kids couldn't have a pick-up game, because as soon as a dispute would erupt, they'd want an adult to negotiate the rules for them. They required an umpire instead of a conversation, and if an adult wasn't available, they would have preferred not to play than to go through the difficult negotiations of the game at hand by themselves.
I noticed other things, too. In my classroom, I'd hear much less discussion about what was happening in government. I wasn't hearing about family discussions over politics, what was happening in the Vermont Legislature or even the national government.
Without a class to process what was happening in our governmental world, discussions generally petered out - and, I believe, important knowledge and an interest in the topic waned, too.
Walter Cronkite had retired, and soon Tom Brokaw did as well. When I was growing up, there were three black-and-white stations over the air on the television. Now, local households could choose from 100 channels in living color via cable and satellite television.
The selections individuals made became dizzying and fragmented. Gone were the days where the news was scooped out in even doses of black, white, and even gray. Eventually, you could pick your chosen point of view and be fed a steady diet of what you'd want to hear, negating the need for a well-rounded viewpoint which mentioned "the other side."
Along came social media, where the echo chambers of polarization would make sure that whatever your point of view, the digital gap of inequality would deepen our inability to hear or tolerate any point of view other than our own. Savvy computers and artificial intelligence began to recognize the demographics of your choices, turning your news feed into an echo chamber of your own opinions. Dissenting voices are now mostly filtered out.
* * *
I'm teaching middle and high school social studies these days, and the political divisiveness in our culture is now on full display in my classroom. In seventh grade we're studying ancient Egypt, and we are creating a model of the Nile River Valley.
Each student is contributing three items to the display. We have camels and pyramids, crocodiles and simple houses made from clay, to place along our replica of the Nile, made from a disposable aluminum turkey roaster and surrounded by cardboard boxes that will be decorated to show life along the water's edge at that time.
Sadly, as of this week, our production is at a total standstill.
While the students agree that one side of the Nile will be desert and the other side will represent the fertile soil left by the annual flooding of the river, the question in dispute is whether the soil should be glued onto the box before the clay houses are attached or after they are glued down.
One might think the argument quaint considering the simplicity of the question, but right now the kids are lined up behind the two leaders of the dispute. Neither side is willing to budge. Each side has deeply held arguments for or against, and no one is willing to discuss compromise.
Our class has spent the better part of two days trying to solve the problem. I won't allow them to move forward without consensus, because the project belongs to the group.
The impediments to successfully working together start with blame. ("Everything was fine until the new kid arrived," one says; "If he wasn't here, it would be just like last year," says another.) This argument seems to echo our national distress about immigration.
Loyalty to the leader in the group is being tested. The two leaders in the class are the most overbearing, and they will stop at nothing to keep their side of the argument at the forefront.
It's not unlike our nation where half the population is "for" the president and the other half "against." Like the Republicans and Democrats, each clique is lined up together and firing phrases at the other group, like "I thought we were friends," "You must vote like me," or "We have to stick together to get our way."
The students now have another strategy to try to get their way: lying.
"That's not what I said," one student objected during the last conversation, pretending their words were misinterpreted even though they had made their point clearly the day before.
So far, not a single student is willing to compromise. They refuse to take turns talking or to listen to one another. Instead, they sit on either side of the room in their chairs, arms folded, faces scowling, and eyes rolling at one another.
I'm throwing in an occasional suggestion, but mostly I'm staying quiet and watching how this group of stubborn thinkers will figure out their differences. It's obvious their behavior is well learned from those around them.
They argue their points without considering anyone but themselves, with convictions so firm I'm left wondering how we're going to overcome this discussion and move along to completion of the project.
Does any of this sound familiar? It's all happening every day right before our eyes. And our children are watching and learning from us.
* * *
The place my class has landed is not unusual given the nature of discussion in our country at present. These kids are doing exactly what we've taught them.
It's not their fault. We took away the place in their education where they might have had the opportunity to learn about compromise and fairness. We've "fixed" many situations in their lives where they might have had the opportunity to experience disappointment or learn to compromise.
We've given them the answers instead of asking them to work things out with others in a dignified and respectful way. And, most importantly, our nation gives them the same message on television and social media multiple times a day: Dig in. Don't listen. Fight for your rights, even if they trample over the rights of others. Blame others for their opinions instead of reevaluating your own. If you don't like the answer, sue. Bring it to the courts. Never give in until you get your way, no matter the consequences.
We've become a country of people who refuse to work together. Must this be our legacy to the next generation of leaders?
* * *
For the past 10 years I was teaching abroad. I spent three of those years teaching elementary science in a large international school in southern China.
My students felt uncomfortable with prediction, and not one of them was willing to make a hypothesis before an experiment. My sixth graders weren't even willing to take a risk and tell me what they thought the weather might be like the following day as a practice run to show how simple a skill prediction can be.
I was having a difficult time discovering why this was so. These were bright kids. They could make predictions. Why wouldn't they?
My answer came in the fall that year during an American presidential election when a 12-year-old student asked in class what it was like to vote.
There is no voting in China, a communistic country. My student's question gave me pause and a real window into the world of their life, their family and how their culture teaches children to think. So could learning to vote help them be able to state their opinions and make a scientific hypothesis?
My solution was to come up with opportunities for class members to make choices in class. Did we want to learn about the water cycle or the life cycle of plants? We could vote!
Despite their curiosity, there was clearly discomfort with the idea of trying out the American way of decision-making. Students needed a lot of direction in terms of how to discuss their opinions and share their ideas. "I" statements are not a thing in China; "we" statements are more common.
Taking an actual vote was awkward and uncomfortable. For my students, raising their hands to state their opinion felt threatening to them as they looked about the room to see how their friends were voting while they worried about what judgment the group might levy upon them for voicing their opinion.
Their faces showed me that voting was not only a foreign concept to them but also an awkward and uncomfortable thing to try when you've never done it before. But I persevered and continued giving them opportunities to voice their opinion.
It wasn't long before I was called into the offices of the school management, and they gently yet firmly explained that I wasn't to bring my background in government into my science classes. Voting was not a good idea, and it was not something I was supposed to be teaching.
The message was crystal clear: All mention of voting was to stop straight away. I was to keep my mouth shut and stop giving students the experience of having choices. Communist nations instead train people for a life where they accept what's said, where their opinions are unwelcome and sometimes not safe to express.
Every culture indoctrinates its young to the ways of its governmental world. So what message do you think we in the United States should be sharing with our kids?
* * *
The children of our nation are watching us, and they are listening to the messages we are giving them, just like my Chinese students.
We have some important choices to make in our country. I don't have the answers, but I'm certainly full of questions.
Do you want our kids to learn that democracy is about give and take, compromise, civil discourse, and free and fair elections, or are we turning the opposite way, as Chinese students are taught?
Do we want to teach our youth to be set in their own opinions, never to compromise? Are we teaching them to fight to the death if others disagree with them?
Our country is changing - and fast. Is it headed in a direction you are pleased about? What if you are not pleased? What action are you taking to make sure your opinion is heard?
Next week ancient Egypt will be put on hold while we go outside and make up some new and inventive games. We'll be formulating our own rules, learning the art of compromise, and experiencing the fun and joy that comes from listening to others and being flexible with our thoughts and needs.
I have a feeling it won't be easy, but I still believe that given the right instruction, these kids can potentially break from the way the adults in our country are acting. I think they can rediscover what their grandparents knew - what it's like to play well with others and resolve their differences.
Our classroom is a microcosm of the world in which they live, and as their social studies teacher, I'll be relying on the framework of our Constitution to show these kids how decisions can be made in their classroom - and how the same skills will, in time, build their communities and make them stronger for the experience of civil disagreement and graceful compromise.
If they learn nothing else, they will experience a real-world example of what it means to be an American living in a democracy and in a community.
This Voices column by Fran Lynggaard Hansen was written for The Commons.
This piece, published in print in the Voices section or as a column in the news sections, represents the opinion of the writer. In the newspaper and on this website, we strive to ensure that opinions are based on fair expression of established fact. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, The Commons is reviewing and developing more precise policies about editing of opinions and our role and our responsibility and standards in fact-checking our own work and the contributions to the newspaper. In the meantime, we heartily encourage civil and productive responses at voices@commonsnews.org.