Life-Enriching Education Read online

  Life-Enriching Education

  Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance,

  Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships.

  Copyright © 2003 by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.

  Published by PuddleDancer Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a photographic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise copied for public or private use without the written permission of the publisher.

  Requests for permission should be addressed to:

  PuddleDancer Press, Permissions Dept.,

  P.O. Box 231129, Encinitas, CA 92023-1129

  Fax: 1-858-759-6967 Email: [email protected]

  Author: Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.

  Editor: Kathy Smith

  Project Director: Jeanne Iler

  Index: Phyllis Linn, INDEXPRESS

  Cover and Interior Design: Lightbourne

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  ISBN: 978-1-892005-05-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rosenberg, Marshall B.

  Life-enriching education : nonviolent communication helps schools improve performance, reduce conflict, and enhance relationships / by Marshall B. Rosenberg.-- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-892005-05-0

  ISBN 978-1-892005-05-2

  1. Teacher-student relationships. 2. Affective education. 3. Communication in education. I. Title.

  LB1033.R66 2003

  371.102’2--dc21

  2003011055

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword by Riane Eisler

  Author’s Foreword

  CHAPTER 1: TOWARD LIFE-ENRICHING EDUCATION

  Introduction

  Life-Enriching Organizations

  Life-Enriching Education

  Changing the System

  NVC in Education—Sharing the Field

  CHAPTER 2: EXPRESSING LIFE-ENRICHING MESSAGES

  Preparing Students

  The Effects of Moralistic Judgments on Learning

  Performance Evaluation Using Value Judgments

  Components of Nonviolent Communication

  Making Clear Observations Without Mixing in Evaluations

  Exercise 1—Observation or Evaluation?

  Identifying and Expressing Feelings

  Exercise 2—Expressing Feelings

  The Risks of Not Expressing Our Feelings

  Exercise 3—Acknowledging Needs

  Requesting That Which Would Make Life More Wonderful

  The Difference Between Requests and Demands

  Exercise 4—Expressing Requests

  The Process Is the Objective

  People Can Hear Demands No Matter What We Say

  NVC in Education—Fun For Everyone

  CHAPTER 3: HEARING MESSAGES WITH EMPATHY

  Empathy

  Verbally Reflecting What We Hear

  Listening for Requests

  Connecting Empathically

  Empathically Connecting With Others When They Don’t Know How to Express Themselves or Choose Not To

  Exercise 5—Differentiating Between Receiving Empathically And Non-Empathically

  CHAPTER 4: CREATING PARTNERSHIP RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

  Partnership in Setting Objectives and Evaluation

  Objectives With Life-Enriching Purposes

  Students Have Always Had a Choice

  Teachers’ Fears of Student Involvement in Objective Setting

  Examples of Mutual Objective Setting

  Hearing the Need Behind the “No.”

  Exercise 6—Hearing the Need Behind “No”

  The Most Important Part of Learning

  Students’ Fears of Student Involvement in Objective Setting

  Partnership in Evaluation

  Accountability, “Yes,” Grades, “No”

  NVC in Education—The Test

  CHAPTER 5: CREATING AN INTERDEPENDENT LEARNING COMMUNITY

  Secular Ethics

  Developing an Interdependent Learning Community

  The Teacher as Travel Agent

  Materials That Allow Students to Learn by Themselves

  Utilization of Students and Parents in Providing Materials

  Volunteer Tutoring Services

  The Geographical Community as Learning Resource

  The Travel Agent in Action

  CHAPTER 6: TRANSFORMING SCHOOLS

  The Problems at Hand

  Domination Organizations

  Conflict Resolution

  Mediation

  NVC in Education—“You’re Dead”

  Avoiding Moralistic Judgments and Diagnoses

  The Protective Use of Force

  Exercise 7—Protective Use of Force vs. Punitive Use of Force

  Creating Sustaining Teams

  Transforming Our Schools

  Bibliography

  Index

  Note Pages

  How You Can Use the NVC Process

  Some Basic Feelings and Needs We All Have

  About PuddleDancer Press

  About CNVC and NVC

  Trade Publications Available from PuddleDancer

  Trade Booklets Available from PuddleDancer Press

  NVC Materials Available from CNVC

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to master teacher Bill Page for giving me, more than thirty years ago, the opportunity to clarify how I would like to see teachers and students working together.

  I am also grateful to JoAnne Anderson and Tom Shaheen, school administrators in Rockford, Illinois, at that time, for giving me the chance in the late 1960s to participate with them in creating schools that functioned in harmony with my values.

  These experiences along with the writings of John Holt, Ivan Illich, John Gatto, and Alfie Kohn deepened my awareness of the politics of education, and further increased my hunger to contribute to radical changes in education. More recently, Riane Eisler’ writings on partnership and dominator education have been influential in this context.

  How grateful I am also to my colleagues Miri Shapiro in Israel, Nada Ignjatovic in Serbia, Vilma Costetti in Italy, and Rita Herzog in the United States for demonstrating what each of us can do to transform schools that teach Domination into schools that provide Life-Enriching learning opportunities.

  And finally I would like to express deep gratitude to Kathy Smith, with additional help from Rita Herzog and Gary Baran, for editing what I have written and translating my university English into readable English.

  Foreword by Riane Eisler

  Many of us recognize that fundamental change in education is urgently needed. We recognize that most present educational systems are not preparing children to meet the unprecedented challenges of the twenty-first century. We recognize that real educational reform is essential if today’s and tomorrow’s children are to live in a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world.

  In this book, Marshall Rosenberg describes key elements of what he calls life-enriching education: an education that prepares children to learn throughout their lives, relate well to others and themselves, be creative, flexible, and venturesome, and have empathy not only for their immediate kin but for all of humankind.

  Enriching life—expanding our minds, hearts, and spirits—should be the goal of education. Unfortunately, traditional education has often constricted rather than expanded the human mind, heart, and spirit. It has interfered with our natural curiosity and joy in learning, suppresse
d inquisitiveness and critical thinking, and modeled uncaring and violent behaviors.

  Fortunately, today most Western schools no longer use violence against children, as in the old motto “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But they still use other teaching methods designed to prepare people to unquestioningly obey orders from above—be it from their teachers in school, supervisors at work, or rulers in government.

  The curriculum, also, often presents violence and domination as normal, even desirable—as in history classes where children must memorize the dates of battles and wars, and literature classes where they are assigned epics in which violent conquest is idealized as manly and heroic. The structure of schools is also generally still one of top-down rankings in which education is something done to students rather than with students.

  This type of educational process, content, and structure is appropriate for what I have called the dominator or domination model of society—where families, workplaces, tribes, and states are organized into rigid rankings of domination ultimately backed by fear and force. It is not an education appropriate for democratic, equitable, and peaceful societies—societies orienting to what I call the partnership model, and Rosenberg calls a life-enriching structure.

  Obviously there has already been considerable movement away from the domination model, at least in some world regions. Had there not been, we could not be talking of fundamental educational change without risking severe consequences, even death—as was the case for any free thought and speech not so long ago during the European Middle Ages, and is still the case in many places today.

  But this forward movement has not been linear. It has not only been fiercely resisted every step of the way; it has also been punctuated by regressions to the domination model. We are experiencing such a regression worldwide today—a regression to more, rather than less, inequality, violence, and human and environmental exploitation and domination. This is why the application of Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication methods to education is so important, so urgent, and so timely.

  Marshall Rosenberg is known worldwide as a pioneer in nonviolent conflict resolution. He has dedicated the last forty years of his life to developing and applying Nonviolent Communication as a tool for relations in which each person is treated with empathy and caring. In this book, he shows us how to use this method in schools. He also shows its effectiveness in preparing young people to work together, resolve conflicts nonviolently, and contribute to both their own and others’ well-being in empathic and caring ways.

  One of the most notable characteristics of Rosenberg’s work is this focus on caring, empathy, and nonviolence—characteristics that in domination-oriented cultures are relegated to those who are excluded from social governance: women and “effeminate” men. Marshall recognizes that these are precisely the characteristics we have to nurture in both boys and girls, and shows how we can do this through tested and effective educational methods that allow young people to experience partnership in action.

  This experience is important for all children. When children experience the life-enriching partnership relations Marshall describes in this book, they flourish. Experiencing these relations is particularly important for children who have in their homes, neighborhoods, and/or nations learned only two alternatives: you either dominate or you are dominated. It shows them that there is another alternative that feels and works much better for everyone.

  Schools in which students and teachers relate as partners—where Marshall’s nonviolent life-expanding education is part of every interaction—are communities of learning rather than top-down, impersonal factories. Young people begin to see school as a place of exploration, a place to share feelings and ideas, a safe and exciting place where each child is recognized and valued, and the human spirit is nurtured and grows.

  And there is more. When we give young people the opportunity to experience relations based on mutual respect and caring, we not only promote their well-being, learning, and personal growth. We also support the shift to a less violent, more equitable, caring, and truly democratic society.

  In our age of nuclear and biological weapons, humanity stands at an evolutionary crossroads. At our level of technological development, the chronic violence and lack of caring and empathy required by relations conforming to the domination model threaten our very survival.

  On one side lies the road of regression to even more rigid domination—familial, educational, religious, economic, and political.

  On the other side lies the road to a more equitable, less violent, more caring partnership future. The movement toward partnership has been escalating for several centuries, partly due to the destabilization of habits and institutions by the technological changes entailed in shifting from a primarily agrarian to industrial world. Today, the rapid shift from industrial to postindustrial technologies is still further destabilizing entrenched beliefs and institutions—opening up further opportunities for positive change. But rather than fostering this movement, education is still often hindering it.

  The most basic question for our future is what kind of culture is education transmitting. Is it education for a life-enriching culture of partnership and peace? Or is it education for a culture of domination and violence?

  As a mother and grandmother, I feel a passionate urgency to help accelerate the global shift toward partnership. I know from both my life and my research that making fundamental changes is not easy. But I also know it can be done. Indeed, it has been done, or we would all still be living in a world where all women and most men knew “their place” in rigid hierarchies of domination. Working together we can create cultures that support rather than inhibit the realization of our highest human potentials: our great capacities for caring, empathy, and creativity. This book—drawing from Marshall Rosenberg’s many years of pioneering work in nonviolent, life-enriching, communications—can help us transform education in ways that advance this urgent task.

  Riane Eisler

  Author of The Chalice and The Blade, Tomorrow’s Children, and The Power of Partnership

  June 25, 2003

  Author’s Foreword

  Public education has for some time been heavily focused on what curricula we believe will be helpful to students. Life-Enriching Education is based on the premise that the relationship between teachers and students, the relationships of students with one another, and the relationships of students to what they are learning are equally important in preparing students for the future.

  Children need far more than basic skills in reading, writing, and math, as important as those might be. Children also need to learn how to think for themselves, how to find the meaning in what they learn, and how to work and live together. Teachers, school administrators and parents will come away from Life-Enriching Education with skills in language, communication, and ways of structuring the learning environment that support the development of autonomy and interdependence in the classroom. These skills will help you to prepare students for living in the world they will inherit.

  My History in Schools in the United States

  I have been consulting with teachers and administrators in public and private schools from the kindergarten to graduate school level for forty years. During this time I have been helping them integrate this process of education I call Life-Enriching Education into their programs.

  I began working with schools while in the private practice of psychology in the early 1960s in St. Louis. Many of the people seeking my services were parents whose children were having problems learning and behaving as school authorities would have liked. Working with the schools on the children’s behalf, I began to see that the way schools were structured created suffering for the majority of teachers and students. I saw that the competitiveness fostered in the schools prevented the students from relating in a caring way with one another.

  I seldom saw school employees as the problem. In the work I’ve done over the years in schools, I have been impressed with the vast majority of tea
chers and administrators with whom I’ve worked. I have been moved by the care I saw they had for their students and the diligence I saw them demonstrate through their continuing efforts to provide learning opportunities that would enrich their students lives. I saw the teachers and administrators as being brutalized by the educational structures just as much as the students.

  My growing awareness of how these educational structures did not support values that were in harmony with my own, led me to explore alternative educational structures. Along with Bill Page, a teacher who had been attending my workshops in Nonviolent Communication I was offering around the city, I explored a different approach to teaching, one in which the teachers relate as partners with the students and the program is designed to promote cooperation instead of competition.

  The authorities in Bill’s school system were reluctant to agree to his conducting a regular class in this manner, but they did permit him to do it with students who were labeled as disruptive and who were not doing schoolwork anyway. We identified sixty such students; thirty of whom were randomly placed in Bill’s class and the rest were left in regular classrooms. Academic tests given at the end of the year showed that the students in Bill’s class learned far more than those in the traditional classrooms. And when they returned to regular classrooms they had far fewer problems over the next four years than the students who had remained in regular classrooms.

  My exploration into alternative approaches was also furthered by the opportunity to work with Tom Shaheen, a visionary superintendent of schools in Rockford, Illinois. He and one of his principals, JoAnn Anderson, were working to create a school system that fostered respect for diversity, autonomy, and interdependence. I was invited to participate in this venture by contributing to the training of teachers. In the first school developed as part of this project, academic achievement was high, vandalism was significantly reduced, and the program was given a national award for excellence in education.

  About this time the War on Poverty was initiated by the Johnson administration. This program provided support for schools in poverty areas to create innovative programs, and I was invited to participate in several of these programs in cities throughout the United States.