…”a very down-to-earth, unusually practical, and very useful guide to creating all kinds of community organizations. I think it should be in every display on building and sustaining vibrant local economies. With case studies and exercises, it is the best book on the subject I’ve seen.”

Carole Horne, General Manager, Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, MA

http://alternet.org:80/blogs/video/61955/

My friend Horace Small, a great organizer, and the Director of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, sent me this short video of comedian George Carlin talking about American “education.”  Carlin speaks the truth, with lots of four-letter words, but the truth it is.  It reminded me a some amazing lectures of writing by Horace Mann, the founder of American public education in a little book I read in 1969 at Teacher College at Columbia.  (It was a required course to allow me to be a teacher as I recall, and I am glad I took it.)   The book included the talks by Mann, (it was edited by Lawrence Cremin, who was supposed the teach the class but got sick that semester and we had some lame graduate student).  The Mann’s writing are amazingly honest in retrospect. because he says,  (like Carlin) that schools were to prepare students (often right off the farm) to be “obedient workers.”  Farm life  fostered independence, and the coming Industrial Revolution would require thousands of workers who would march to bells, follow orders, and work in mass production lines alongside other obedient workers.  For this they would have to be prepared, and public school would do this job. . 

There is little critical thinking taught today in most public schools, and I think this is not an unintended consequence or an accident.  Such a large scale result comes from design, not dumb ...   more »

A good point.  It helps to ask if asking “How can I do this?”  is really an excuse not to act.  Block also points out that the most important job in building organizations, or changing them, is to ask the right questions.   I agree.  We need to focus much more on finding the right questions, not seeking answers to the questions we always ask.

So, in organizing, we need to stop and slow down and ask ourselves: What questions do I need to ask here?

I agree, with Block, that we often lack more the will than the tools to get the job done.

So, an important question, then, would be: How do we gain the will to accomplish what we want?  How do we strengthen and support it?  What models do we have of what has worked.

Block, focuses mostly on individual business and asks employees to be true to their hearts and values.  However, it fails to recognize the political dimensions that would foster such truth seeking.  Global market capitalism forces those individual businesses to focus on the financial bottom line to survive.  Without government regulation to enforce environmental and worker protections, businesses are not likely to be ...   more »