FRIDAY MAY 30, 2025

Last week I said that I wanted to use my short articles in these last few Friday newsletters of the year to write about more general issues. And so I wrote last week about further aspects of the thinking of Kurt Hahn, an extension of some thoughts about Hahn that I shared with you earlier this semester. Today I want to write  about another trenchant thinker, this time a contemporary who just happens to be the same age as me!  He is Michael Sandel, the Professor of Government at Harvard University, a distinguished philosopher of social justice.

As an introduction to what I want to say about Sandel, I’ll go back to the ending of my piece last week. Here, again, is Kurt Hahn’s seventh ‘law’ and my commentary on it:

Free the sons of the wealthy and powerful from the enervating sense of privilege

For ‘sons’, we should now read ‘sons and daughters’.  Hahn was worried that the children in his expensive, fee-paying school, whose parents were wealthy, might end up weak and enfeebled, or feeling too entitled, by the privileged position in society that they occupied.  They might think, as young students, that they need not work hard, or push themselves, or develop resilient and strong characters, because they were going to inherit powerful positions regardless of their own efforts. We need to keep on reminding ourselves of the wisdom of that phrase.  If our students, your children, feel that they are entitled, or inherently privileged, we must as teachers and parents undermine that enervating sense of privilege.  It is in their interests that we should do so.  We should try to inculcate another virtue so important to Hahn, compassion, as an antidote to privilege.

A focus on privilege and compassion is a precision lens through which to view some of Sandel’s work. About 4 years ago, during the Covid pandemic, I was fortunate to participate with a small group in a 90-minute Zoom conversation led by Professor Sandel. He was in Harvard, and I was in Beijing. Michael is part of a group of scholars to which I belong. He is perhaps best known for his book Justice, published over 15 years ago, and the very popular course at Harvard that he teaches on this subject.  The book that was the focus of the online meeting a few years back was The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good, which he had just then published.  Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, wrote this at the time: “The Tyranny of Merit deftly exposes the flaws and fallacies of meritocratic philosophy. In lucid, illuminating prose, Sandel makes a compelling case for uprooting inequality and building a fairer society shaped by true principles of justice.” I feel that anyone and everyone connected to schools such as ours needs to be aware of some of the key ideas in this book.  

Here is Professor Sandel’s online conversational summary of some of its main themes, with a few comments from me. Sandel said that a driving force in his thinking is to open up ‘a meaningful debate about what contributes to the common good’.  He has been focused on this for many years now, and his book on justice has this question as its subtitle: What’s the right thing to do?  He sees the matter of merit as paradoxical, double-edged.  On the one hand, the ability and opportunity to rise and improve one’s position in society, based on one’s individual merit, is encouraging; on the other, it has come to be seen by many who do not have this capability to be stifling, and oppressive.  In the USA, for example, much emphasis has been placed for many years, and still is, on the value of a college degree for upward mobility in what is often claimed to be a meritocratic society.  Yet, as Sandel pointed out, nearly two thirds of adults in the USA do not have a 4-year college degree.  How do they feel about being left out in this way?

The answer to that last question is connected for Sandel to the power of the populist movements, some of them white supremacist, in his country currently, but also elsewhere, such as my country of birth, South Africa.  He sees their power as a complaint against the ‘tyranny of merit’, a complaint which he would argue is to some degree justified, even as he disagrees with many of the ways used to express that complaint.  Sandel suggests that we habitually value different types of work in hierarchical ways that are damaging and, in many cases, wrong.  In the online meeting, he came back again and again to this phrase, ‘the dignity of work’, and said that the pandemic period had allowed us to think about essential work, and workers, in refreshing ways and to revalue, for example, delivery workers, grocery store workers, truckers, home care providers, childcare providers, and of course health care providers, our nurses and doctors and hospital staff.

An extension of this for Sandel is to note that ‘doing well’, which often means little more than becoming wealthy, is not necessarily the same as ‘doing good’.  The two can, of course, go together, but sometimes the accumulation of riches and royalty makes it harder to do good.  For Sandel, success and human flourishing happen when we are ‘exercising our human capacities to contribute to the common good’.  He put it thus in that meeting: ‘The only way we can know that we have contributed to the common good is to see our work reflected back to us’; and, ‘A fundamental human need is to be needed by others and to have that recognized’.

Near the end of a long, winding and fascinating conversation, Sandel remarked on the link in ancient China, and in ancient Greece, and in the early years of the United States Republic, between meritocracy and virtue, and between good leaders and good values.  But now, he suggested, leaders in many domains are often those who are merely rich and whose values have been corrupted.  Some of us in contemporary societies follow obsessively those who have ‘done well’ and we can become too easily fixated on celebrity.  Our common good would be better served, he says, by paying more attention to the ‘economy of esteem’, which might lead to a much greater investment in training of all sorts and at all levels, and also a deeper sense of what work contributes meaningfully to the common good and what does not.

How might all this relate to AISL, our school?  For me, it reinforces the deep power of our five shared values, both in philosophy and in practice.  We need to link these as often as we can, without becoming monotonous and boring, to what we say and what we do. We must continue grafting these values onto all the various aspects of our curriculum, so that we grow an all-embracing curriculum of and for the common good of our community and, by extension, other communities. Amongst many other things, this means showing sincere respect for all who work here, and recognizing the value of what they do, whatever that is. 

And so, how about more Community Engagement Days, such as we held last Friday? And how about more assemblies like that on our value ‘courage’, hosted by the Grade 1s, again last Friday? And how about more efforts like those by our parent Fadwa Gazza and our teacher Waldo Rosner to support our support staff? And how about more, and more, and more….

To conclude, and summing up within the context of all of the above, let me say a huge thank you to the AISL PTO for the Staff Appreciation lunch yesterday. The PTO, on behalf of all the parents, recognises with appreciation the labour of all who work here. And this is joint labor, AISL employees and parents together. We are all engaged in the noble work of educating children. What a grand and dignified task this is.

Thank you, everyone.