Know Power, Know Responsibility: How to unleash the potential of every child in America

Prologues Part 3: What Makes You So Smart? and 4: Calvin and Hobbes

Author’s Note: I will publish additional sections of this book each week. You can find previously posted sections at the following links: Note to Parents of School Age Children and Note to Teachers, School Administrators, and Other School Staff here; Introduction here; and Prologues Part 1 and 2 here.

PROLOGUE PART 3 — What Makes You So Smart?

You may wonder what qualifies me to write a book calling for the complete reform of public education. What makes me so smart?

I actually don’t think anyone, including me, is smart enough to come up with an adequate structure or design that will effectively educate all children. In fact, I don’t believe there is one. That’s really what this entire book is about, as you will soon see.

Here, then, I will share how I came to write this book. In many respects, it has been in the works for over forty years. I was aware back in middle school that the structure of school was ineffective and inefficient. While I couldn’t articulate it at the time, seeds were being planted for revelations that emerged only recently.

I graduated high school with honors but didn’t want to go to college. I spent four years in the workforce before heading off to the University of Wisconsin–Stout, where I majored in technology education and minored in English. While at Stout, I joined the Wisconsin Army National Guard for the education benefits. I graduated from Stout in 1990.

I taught automotive technology and graphic communications at Oregon High School in Wisconsin, where I enjoyed teaching but also found a lot of frustrations. I was teaching elective courses, so my students had chosen to take my classes, but often they were not engaged — and certainly not enthusiastic.

I rarely had conduct issues, but it was clear that students were not effectively engaged, and much of the time they were clearly not learning. I sought to implement more relevant classes, joined the School Improvement Team, and worked to make my classes more engaging. But the limitations of the school structure itself severely limited available options.

One of my mentors encouraged me to accept a position at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) as a technology education consultant. This was an opportunity to affect education at a higher and more influential level. Over the next seven years, I worked on state-level career and technical education initiatives and served as the state director of Wisconsin SkillsUSA (called VICA then), an organization for students preparing for careers in trade, technical, and skilled service areas.

During this same time, I fulfilled my military service obligation and could have left the National Guard. As with teaching, my service had rewards but also many frustrations. I saw a need for better leadership and was encouraged to stay in and attend Officer Candidate School. I did so and was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army in 1995.

I continued trying to figure out how to substantially improve education for all students. I spent time with others striving for more innovation. We discussed the need to reinvent education while several state and national efforts emerged toward this end, but they had little to no impact. I thought being a school administrator might provide the answers I was seeking, so I left DPI. My experiences over the next fifteen years brought clarity to the shortcomings of our current school model and its focus on student compliance.

During that time, I taught eighth-grade English (while attending grad school), interned in a large urban high school, served as a suburban middle school associate principal (where I had primary responsibility for student conduct and discipline), served as the director of career and technical education in an urban school district, and returned to DPI as the dual-enrollment consultant. I led the opening of two charter high schools and the development of numerous innovative programs. Yet, time after time, the factory school model limited any chance of fulfilling students’ potentials.

One DPI initiative, however, showed how a different approach to implementing innovation could pave the way for significant change and improvement. The Wisconsin Academic and Career Planning initiative and its statewide implementation were innovative in many ways. They affirmed my evolving belief in and understanding of how much better our public education system could be if it ensured students took true ownership of their learning, with teachers serving as mentors and facilitators.

Throughout this time, I was diving more fully into personalized learning and innovative practices. I presented at national conferences, had in-depth dialogues with leaders in these areas, and visited schools implementing these practices, where I spoke with many students and staff members. I was the lead writer for a document published by DPI called “Fostering Innovation in Wisconsin Schools.” (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2017) Its purpose is to help schools find flexibilities in Wisconsin laws and rules so they can implement innovative practices. (For more information on this, see the sidebar on page XX in Chapter 21).

Concurrently, my military journey continued. I was commissioned an engineer officer and served as an engineer platoon leader, engineer company commander, and a battalion-level engineer officer. I served several years as a TAC (train, advise, and counsel) officer in the Officer Candidate School — including as the senior TAC officer — and as an instructor for the Command and General Staff Officer Course (CGSOC). As I write this, I am the lead instructor for a CGSOC team at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin and was just selected as our next battalion Director of Instruction. In 2017 I was selected as the 80th Training Command Officer Instructor of the Year.

In 2008–09 I was deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. There, I commanded a Provincial Police Mentor team in Kunar Province. While this seems barely relevant to the subject of this book, it was a critical piece of the puzzle. I was trained in counterinsurgency, and my team trained Afghan police leaders on a variety of organizational-level skills. Concurrently, we were helping them overcome centuries of a paradigm that corruption and violence would always be a part of their world. We were truly trying to foster changes within systems that were deeply entrenched and institutionalized. What could possibly provide better experiences preparing me to foster change in our 126-year-old educational system?

Supplementing these experiences has been a voracious appetite for reading and studying professional literature and other media on learning, brain development, human development, motivation, innovation, organizational development and change, human culture, spirituality, educational practices, quantum physics, evolution, and more. I’ve read numerous biographies and autobiographies of diverse individuals, each providing clues about how life experiences affect one’s future and expanding insights on significantly improving our educational system.

In addition to my professional and military journeys, I have been on a more personal journey. I married my beautiful wife Katherine in 1995, and we had two sons, Samuel in 2000 and Matthew in 2003. As I write this, Samuel is in his first year of college and Matthew is a high school freshman. Watching and experiencing their journeys through a traditional public-school system has been truly enlightening.

I have, of course, been doing this in partnership with my wife. Katherine entered this child-rearing partnership with what I would call a “traditional paradigm,” in which parents are in charge and children listen and behave. All of us have evolved as a family over the past nineteen years, and this, too, has substantially contributed to my understanding of why we must change our educational system and how we can do so.

I believe in a sort of destiny — that each of us is called to somehow contribute to the greater good of our world and society if only we will pay attention and answer when called. I have been searching for my “calling” most of my life.

In 2016, my calling became clear. My education, training, and experiences were coalescing to create a vision of what our American educational system could be. I realized I was not the first to see this; many before have provided such a vision and called for change. The diversity of my experiences, however, has provided a unique perspective and understanding of both why and how we can achieve this change.

I decided to leave my DPI consultant position in February 2017 to pursue this calling full time. When I left, I wasn’t sure how it would play out. I planned to offer my services to schools and districts who were ready for change. One of the leaders in the field of school innovation and personalized learning, Dr. Richard Halverson from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, recommended I write a book laying all this out. I initially resisted, but as I worked on school innovation and talked with people about my vision, I realized the only forum for laying out the entire vision was in a book.

That is how I ended up here. Does all this make me qualified to write a book on designing a new model of school in and for the twenty-first century? I guess that remains to be seen. Fortunately, that’s also irrelevant. I don’t believe anyone should jump aboard this reform/reinvention train because they trust in my opinions and statements or because they think I have the necessary expertise.

Instead, I want you to reflect on your own experiences and observations, confront your own biases and fears, and then consider whether you believe our current educational system is the best we can do for our children and all future generations. If after reading this book you still believe our current system is adequate, then hopefully you got the book at a discount or from the library so little was lost. On the other hand, if you realize we can do better, then I hope you join with others in reinventing education in your community. If this book helps you do that, then all the better.

PROLOGUE PART 4 — Calvin and Hobbes

I have been a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan since I first saw it. I believe it is popular because it plays out thoughts and feelings most of us have experienced but didn’t feel at liberty to express. This seems especially true with Calvin’s experiences in school that illustrate shortcomings of our educational system. Like most of the best humor, they are rooted in truth.

I planned to include a variety of the strips throughout this book to help illustrate many of the points being made, but I decided the book was already too long and only used a couple. I truly appreciate the genius of Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes’s creator, and maybe I’ll write a version of this book entirely built around Calvin and Hobbes. I’d like to think Bill and Calvin would endorse the arguments being made in this book. This one four-panel strip sums up numerous points that are made in this book:

Because I don’t have a license to reproduce the comic in this publication, you can view it here at the syndication website:

Continue with the next section of Know Power, Know Responsibility (Part 1 — Chapters 0 and 1), here:

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Kevin Miller is a Boomer who joined the Army during the Cold War and continues to serve. He has spent 30-plus years working in K-12 education as a teacher, administrator, and consultant and is now on a mission to reinvent our school model. His book Know Power, Know Responsibility provides the imperatives for a complete redesign of schools and the way to get there. See his website knowresponsibility.com to learn more.