All posts by placheli

Introducing Democracy Dinners

(c) Paul Lachelier 2019

With the intent to connect democracy (broadly defined) professionals, activists and academics across specialty silos, and to nurture cross-fertilizing conversation about a variety of democracy issues and areas of work in metro Washington DC, Learning Life is organizing Democracy Dinners. For more about the Dinners, or to add yourself or someone else to the invitation list, click here.

Paul Lachelier, Ph.D.

P.S. Thanks to marketing and strategy consultant, Dorie Clark, from whose networking dinners these Democracy Dinners are adapted.)

Seven Ways of Being in the World

(c) Paul Lachelier 2019

Given globalization — in short, countries’ growing economic, political and environmental interconnection driven in part by advancements in communications and transport — it behooves those interested in the wider world to consider the ways that people live in or engage with the world.  Why?  Because some of those ways are good, some are problematic, and all together reveal sharp inequalities.  I see seven ways that people cross (or do not cross) national borders and live in the world, for better or worse.

7 Ways of Being in the World

It is worth stressing that the following seven ways describe not types of people but ways of being, that some (usually more privileged) individuals can shift from one way to another sometimes in the same week or day, and over a lifetime any person may engage with the world in more than one of these ways.  Also, my definitions of these seven ways are overall more encompassing and in many cases different than those of other organizations, like the United Nations and Amnesty International.  Further, I do not provide estimates on the numbers of people engaged in these seven ways of being in the world since others provide estimates, these numbers change constantly, and my purpose here is to paint a bigger picture.

1. The disengaged: It is probably best to start with the largest group, who are not engaged with the world outside their country much if at all.  Whether due to ideology, geographic isolation, institutional disconnection, insufficient resources, or some combination thereof, the disengaged know little about the world and have traveled little if at all outside their country.  Because the world outside their country, or even their community, is far and foreign in their minds, some (not all) of the disengaged are wary of foreigners and of traveling abroad.

2. Non-exploited workers: These workers move out of their native country, with or without their family, to find or take work in other countries.  They typically have had relatively privileged upbringings, have more education and social status, have legal right to work in a foreign country, and make more money from their work.  They may be government foreign affairs officers, transnational business executives and employees, or nonprofit workers.  Like exploited workers, non-exploited workers more commonly live and work in richer countries, where there are more economic opportunities, and life is more stable and prosperous.

3. Exploited workers: Like non-exploited workers, exploited workers leave their native country to find or take work, with or often without their families.  However, they tend to have unprivileged upbringings, less education and social status, may not have the legal right to work, and take jobs that do not pay well by the host country’s standards.  Furthermore, their employers or managers often overwork or otherwise abuse them (yell at them, hit them, sexually harass or assault them, expose them to dangerous working conditions, etc.) yet the workers voluntarily endure the exploitation because they are able to work and earn more money than they would in their home communities.  Many work in construction, farms, factories, or domestic service.  Many exploited workers do not see their families for long periods of time, yet they receive enough in wages to send home money (“remittances”), which can constitute a significant portion of their families’ and countries’ income.

4. Slaves: Millions of people in the world are enslaved, despite the fact that laws in most countries prohibit slavery.  Unlike exploited workers, slaves do not voluntarily submit to their exploitation; they work and are confined against their will, often in their own countries.  Most are poor, and come from poorer and highly unequal countries.  Some get tricked with promises of better lives and trafficked into richer countries, where they commonly do sex, factory, farm and/or domestic work.

5. Refugees: Unlike exploited workers who leave their home country for better economic opportunities, refugees flee their country due to war, persecution or natural disaster.  More conflict, authoritarian government and climate change usually mean more refugees.  Some refugees are legally accepted in foreign countries.  Others — called “asylum seekers” if they’re escaping war or persecution — are not, and live insecure lives as they seek legal permission to live in the country they fled to, working whatever undocumented jobs they can find to make ends meet.

6. Vacationers: As incomes rise across the world, more people have the disposable income to be able to travel abroad.  The standard vacationer visits a foreign country to consume its food, sites and experiences, and to have a good time.  Some travel companies create all-inclusive resorts so that vacationers never have to leave the resort to see the country and people around it.  Vacationers understandably tend to flock to politically and economically more stable countries, but all countries welcome foreign vacationers with open arms because they have more money than most of the world’s people, and they usually spend more money on vacation than they do at home.

7. Global citizens: Global citizens are typically as privileged as vacationers, but unlike vacationers they travel abroad primarily to learn and/or volunteer rather than consume and have a good time.  Whether they take classes, volunteer as teachers, community developers or religious missioners, they tend to engage more deeply than vacationers with the people of the foreign countries they live in or visit.  As more people across the world get more income and education, global citizens, like vacationers, will likely become more common (assuming relative peace and economic stability among nations).  Among these seven ways of being, global citizens may also be the best grassroots agents for nurturing goodwill among nations.

For more information about world migration patterns and trends, visit the International Organization for Migration, which issues detailed reports.

Paul Lachelier, Ph.D.

Families: A New Voice for a More Caring World

(c) Paul Lachelier 2019

Where Are All the Citizens?

Name your issue — climate change, war, terrorism, poverty, pollution, crime, violence against women, etc. — all of them share the same condition: in order to address them effectively, you need to mobilize people, often lots of people.  Further, democracies by definition depend on people’s participation in power.  Even in republics, where the people elect their representatives and the representatives make most of the government decisions, people still need to be informed and engaged enough to make wise election choices as well as to participate in the plethora of other republican institutions that require citizen engagement — including political parties, court juries, government advisory committees, and voluntary associations of all kinds — to address pressing public needs and problems.

Hence, in democratic (including republican) societies, arguably one of the most important questions to ask is: how do we get people to pay attention and act as citizens, that is, as people who care about public affairs?  Mind you, this is not quite the same as asking “how do we get people to pay attention and act as partisans or consumers?”  Businesses, political parties, interest groups, advertising agencies and public relations firms can be quite skilled at getting people to pay attention, absorb partial information, and act as angry partisans or avid consumers.  Indeed, there is too much socialization and mobilization of consumers and partisans in modern societies.  What is, in contrast, far less common and institutionalized is the socialization and mobilization of citizens.

Families as Sites for (Non-)Citizenship
Families in public life

If there is one institution Americans think of most often as the proper training ground for citizenship it is the school.  In contrast, families are widely supposed to provide something more basic than schooling: what sociologists call “primary socialization” or the fundamental knowledge, beliefs and behaviors that allow a person to function generally in their society.  This is distinguished from “secondary socialization” whereby a person learns, through schools, businesses, civic associations and other organizations, the knowledge, beliefs and behaviors that allow them to function in specific groups or organizations.  That secondary socialization includes citizenship education, and the most appropriate place for that education is the school.  And so the usual story goes.

However, the family is not only a core site for primary socialization, it is the site for the reproduction of societies numerically and socially.  Kids are usually made in families, and kids typically go on to become the parents, workers and citizens societies require.  As ample research on political socialization shows, the children of active citizens (people who read news, discuss public issues, vote, donate to and volunteer for public causes, etc.) are themselves more likely to become active citizens.  In fact, families can have more influence on the shaping of citizens than do schools and other institutions (Burns, Schlozman & Verba 2001, Verba, Schlozman & Burns 2005, Flanagan & Levine 2010, Schlozman, Verba & Brady 2012, Brady, Schlozman & Verba 2015, Kim & Lim 2019, Lahtinen, Erola & Wass 2019).  Through parents, relatives and their friends, children learn the beliefs and behaviors of active or passive citizenship, and gather little to much knowledge about public affairs.  Much of this family-based learning about citizenship, or lack thereof, is not conscious or planned as it is in a school civics course, but it often lasts far longer, over years rather than a fleeting semester.  Such citizenship learning can also be more impactful because it takes the form not of conscious instruction but taken-for-granted habits and identities of parents, relatives and friends with whom children tend to have closer and hence more influential relationships.  This makes families less recognized yet arguably more important sites for the socialization of active or passive citizens.

The Private Family in Modern Times

Families are not just vital agents for citizenship education, but a major focus of public action.  Whether to marry, divorce, work (and at what kind of work), have children, have one or more children, and how to raise them are just some of the important questions couples grapple with privately in modern societies, but all kinds of institutions — governments, businesses, schools, and a host of nonprofits — have strong stakes in those decisions.  History at least in modern times is replete with small and large, sporadic and systematic interventions to coerce or coax the family in one direction or another on these questions.  Think of all the heated debates, mob actions and government policies, past and present, concerning adultery, out-of-wedlock births, abortion, miscegenation, divorce, homosexual marriages, paid family leave, child abuse, and child support, to name a few.

Given the family’s large role in citizen education, it seems peculiar that public affairs have long intervened in the family, but collectively families have historically intervened little in public affairs.  Of course, a minuscule minority of powerful families have long ruled tribes, governments and businesses (e.g., the House of Plantagenet in England, the Ming Dynasty in China, the Medicis in Florence, the Kennedys in the USA, the Rothschilds in many countries), but the vast majority of families in human history have had little to no voice in public affairs.

Industrialization in the 1700s onward shifted work more and more from the family shop or farm to larger factories. This shift coincided with the growth of modern governments and business corporations, the former levying taxes, drafting soldiers and imposing rules on families like never before, the latter pushing more work and peddling more consumerism on families than ever before.  In the process, the family lost much of its public role as a site of community production, and increasingly became what it is now, a site for private and increasingly manipulated, avid yet disconnected consumption (Lasch 1977, Barrett & McIntosh 1982, Zaretsky 1986, Linn 2004, Schor 2004).  Accordingly, there is far less sense of family agency in the world, and more of a sense of family vulnerability to powerful and seemingly uncontrollable outside forces.

Families at the Decision-Making Table
Families in public life

One might understandably imagine that modern advancements in family income, education and communication, plus expanding interventions in and supports for families (e.g., paid family leave, maternal nutrition programs, public education, child care programs, tax credits for families and children), would mobilize families to engage in public affairs, spur the growth of large family associations, and seats for these associations at the decision-making tables of local, state, national and international governmental bodies.  Families in developed democracies often have some voice in local school matters in such forums as parent-teacher associations.  There are also nonprofit think tanks, policy groups and political associations that advocate for families at local to international levels.  However, I do not know of any large, cross-class membership associations composed of diverse parents and legal guardians and/or children that not only speak out for families, but participate in government decision-making.

If businesses and labor organizations get a seat at the government decision-making table, why don’t families as one of the most important institutions in society?  Government decisions directly impact not only business and labor, but families too.  Governments impact families directly through policies on divorce, homosexual marriage, paid family leave, child support, etc., and indirectly through policies on employment, wages, taxes, safety, the environment, foreign affairs, and more.  As in other domains, experts and professionals are happy to occupy those seats at the decision-making table, but for anyone who believes in democracy (whether republican or more direct), there is a strong case for rotating diverse ordinary parents, guardians and children in those seats.  Of course, most families would have much to learn about the complexities of policy and government, but there is arguably no more powerful way to affirm and nurture families as schools for for citizenship.  Governments would, in turn, gain much from including family voices, rich to poor, in their deliberations, not just as advisors but as decision-makers.

Just as ordinary workers participate in business problem-solving in many companies, and ordinary citizens help decide cases as jurors in many courts, so can ordinary families inform government policies.  Moreover, including families in decision-making could help soften the hard edges of government — inviting smiles and occasioning more conversations between adversaries who can find common ground in their devotion to family — and nurture a politics of care that prioritizes the wellbeing of families and the most vulnerable.  The family thus need not be a haven in a heartless world; it can be a new voice for a more caring world.

Paul Lachelier, Ph.D.

References

Barrett, M., and M. McIntosh.  1982.  The Anti-Social Family.  London: Verso.

Brady, H. E., Schlozman, K. L., and Verba, S.  2015.  “Political mobility and political reproduction from generation to generation.”  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 657:1:149–173.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716214550587

Burns, N., K. Schlozman, and S. Verba.  2001.  The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Flanagan, C., and Levine, P.  2010.  “Civic engagement and the transition to adulthood.”  The Future of Children, 20:1:159–179.  https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ883084.pdf

Lasch, C.  1977.  Haven in a heartless world: The family besieged.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Lahtinen, H., J. Erola, and H. Wass.  2019.  “Sibling Similarities and the Importance of Parental Socioeconomic Position in Electoral Participation.”  Social Forces soz010.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz010

Kim, H., and E. Lim.  2019.  “A cross-national study of the influence of parental education on intention to vote in early adolescence: the roles of adolescents’ educational expectations and political socialization at home.”  International Journal of Adolescence and Youth 24:1:85-101.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2018.1470993

Linn, Susan.  2004.  Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood.  New York: The New Press.

Schlozman, K. L., Verba, S., & Brady, H. E.(2012). The unheavely chorus: Unequal political voice and the broken promise of American democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schor, J.B.  2004.  Born to buy: The commercialized child and the new consumer culture.  New York: Scribner.

Verba, S., Schlozman ,K. L., & Burns, N.  2005.  “Family ties: Understanding the intergenerational transmission of participation”  in A. S. Zuckerman (ed.) Social logic of politics: Personal networks as contexts, pp. 95–116.  Philadelphia,PA: Temple University Press.

Zaretsky, Eli.  1986 [1976].  Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life.  New York: Harper & Row.

Globalization, Inequality & Opportunity

Thanks to Learning Life intern Thalia Navia for her assistance in the research for this post.

Globalization is increasing, and for good reason.  Advances in transport and communication technologies are making it easier for people to travel and talk across national borders.  This leads to greater trade and movement across borders, which in turn brings people more and cheaper goods and services as well as more opportunities to explore, learn, collaborate and prosper.

Globalization, Inequality & Opportunity

Globalization – simply defined, more connections and interdependence between countries – is driven to a great extent by businesses searching for profits.  When businesses are able to sell their goods and services to more consumers abroad, they expand their potential for growth and profits.  This helps explain why pay tends to be higher in international trade-directed than non-trade directed jobs (Griswold 2016), and why international jobs – like customer service representatives, market analysts, digital map-makers, language interpreters and translators, and airline and hospitality workers – are proliferating (Sentz 2016, Peltier 2018).

Given our world’s globalizing trend, persisting socio-economic inequities as to who participates in and leads foreign affairs threatens to further marginalize already disadvantaged groups, and undermine the representativeness of international business and policy-making.  In the United States, this is especially true for African and Hispanic Americans, who comprise 14% and 17% of the U.S. population, respectively, yet who represent just:

  • 5% and 7.5% of U.S. college students who study abroad (Carr 2014)
  • 4% and 5.1% of U.S. Foreign Service officers (Miller 2015)
  • 2% and 3% of executives of Fortune 500 companies (Jones 2017)

Unfortunately, race and ethnicity dovetail closely with income and wealth, and Hispanic and African Americans have substantially less of both than European and Asian Americans on average (Peterson Foundation 2018).  This makes it more difficult for blacks and Latinos to take advantage of travel abroad opportunities that help stimulate interest in the wider world.

While some individuals can overcome disadvantages to pursue successful international careers, it is much more difficult for marginalized groups to do so without government policies – like annual grants for travel, study and work abroad in high school and college, and consistent funding for effective international engagement programs at all ages – that widen opportunity on a large scale.  Of course, there are a number of U.S. programs that fund international study, exchanges and travel abroad, such as the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange & Study Abroad Program, the Critical Language Scholarship Program, and the Youth Ambassadors Program.  However, the number of spots or grants offered are often quite limited, and those who take advantage of these programs – even programs meant exclusively to benefit ethnic and racial minorities, like the Thomas Pickering Fellowship and the Charles Rangel Summer Enrichment Program – tend to come from economically relatively privileged backgrounds.

Reformers who wish to open the world to marginalized peoples cannot create programs and expect the disadvantaged to throng to them.  If they do, they will continue to disproportionately attract privileged applicants.  Inequality segregates the disadvantaged and tends to narrow their geographic horizons, so they are much less inclined to take advantage of opportunities to engage with a world so foreign to them.  Thus, reformers must go to the marginalized, opening opportunities in direct and sustained ways in their otherwise segregated communities.

It takes time and an accumulation of experiences – conversations, books, magazines, games, films, travel, classes, volunteering, internships, work — to understand, care about, and act effectively in the world.  That’s an accumulation the advantaged are more likely to gather, little by little, as they grow up.  Absent government policies to provide marginalized groups with such bridge-building opportunities in their own communities, nonprofits can do much to open the world to the disadvantaged.  This includes mentorship, field trips, games, documentary discussions, volunteering, virtual exchanges, and other opportunities that can enrich marginalized neighborhoods, and connect the traveled and untraveled, with or without costly travel abroad.

Globalization holds much promise, but whether that promise is fulfilled for all rather than a few depends on clear-eyed purpose, sustained effort, and bridge-building to connect the marginalized to the world.

Paul Lachelier, Ph.D.
Founder & Director, Learning Life

References

Carr, Sarah.  May 8, 2014.  “As Study Abroad Becomes More Crucial, Few Low-Income Students Go.”  The Hechinger Report. 

Griswold, Daniel.  August 1, 2016.  “Globalization and Trade Help Manufacturing.”  The Los Angeles Times. 

Jones, Stacy.  June 9, 2017.  “White Men Account for 72% of Corporate Leadership at 16 of the Fortune 500 Companies.”  Fortune. 

Miller, Lia.  June 2015.  “Toward a Foreign Service Reflecting America.”  The Foreign Service Journal.

Peltier, Dan.  March 22, 2018.  “Tourism Jobs Numbers Increase Despite Modest Introduction of Artificial Intelligence.”  Skift.

Peter G. Peterson Foundation.  September 13, 2018.  “Income and Wealth in the United States: An Overview of Recent Data.”

Sentz, Rob.  September 27, 2016.  “Three Jobs That Are Growing Because of Globalization.”  Forbes.

Toward Good Health, Local to Global

Good health is vital.  The less healthy one is, the less one is able to perform as a private individual in school, work and family, let alone as a public citizen in community and society.  The vigor and happiness of individuals, families, communities, societies, indeed the entire world, thus depends on good health.  In turn, human health is also impacted by a myriad of factors, from the local food supply to global climate change.  These are two major reasons why Learning Life has begun orienting our programming toward health.

Countless pressing public issues are health issues, including bullying, child abuse, domestic violence, depression, loneliness, drug abuse, drunk driving, gun violence, hunger, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, income and wealth inequality, human trafficking, communicable diseases ranging from common cold viruses to deadly Ebola, terrorism, war, pollution, and climate change.  As this long yet far from complete list demonstrates, health issues run from violence at home, or bullying in one’s school or neighborhood, to international phenomena like human trafficking, terrorism and climate change.  Furthermore, many of these health issues are interconnected and happen in many localities yet they are shaped by big, complicated histories and institutional actors — religious faiths, multinational businesses, national governments, international governmental bodies — whose powerful actions are often invisible and incomprehensible to all but a few trained and paid specialists.  Thus, human health is affected by so many issues local to global yet the connections and causes of those issues are dauntingly complex.

Faced with such complex health problems, it is tempting to ignore them.  But ironically, the less one knows, the more one is at risk for avoidable health problems (e.g., those less educated are more likely to smoke, take drugs, overeat, etc.) while other health threats, like drunk driving, inequality, and climate change, one can ignore but cannot avoid entirely, if at all.  Those who are resource-poor are the least able to avoid many public problems that have health impacts.  So, we can either put our heads in the sand, or take action, and Learning Life aims to take action.

Accordingly, in fall 2017, Learning Life began collaborating with the Georgetown University School of Medicine’s (GUSM) Community Health Division.  That collaboration helped propel Learning Life’s research this year comparing the health and food cultures of our CDI (Citizen Diplomacy Initiative) families in Washington DC, San Salvador, El Salvador, and Dakar, Senegal (click here for the first study, with further research results coming soon), and our larger family food culture project.  Food clearly impacts health, and has the educational advantage of being a universal, daily preoccupation of interest to most people.  Food culture — which we define as a group’s food shopping, cooking and eating habits and beliefs — also varies substantially cross-nationally, and can be shaped to advance health and learning about the world.  Hence, food culture seems a fitting focus for our project work between CDI families in different countries.

The GUSM Community Health Division, under the leadership of Dr. Kim Bullock, welcomes partnerships with community organizations to help improve community health education while giving Georgetown medical students experience in what the medical profession commonly calls “the social determinants of health” (SDHs).  A pie chart (University of North Carolina-Charlotte 2018) often employed to provide U.S. medical students and health professionals with perspective on the determinants of health gives a sense of the importance of SDHs:

Determinants of Health

As the chart shows, SDHs have the largest impact on people’s health, surpassing individuals’ own actions (diet, exercise, smoking, drug-taking, etc.), and much surpassing a person’s genetics, environment, or medical care resources.  The second chart below  (Kaiser Family Foundation 2018) unpacks the SDH term, giving a sense of the wide range of SDHs, and hence why these factors, together, matter so much to human health:

Social Determinants of Health

The chart underscores that while good or bad health is experienced individually, it is shaped by a range of social factors, some of which, like literacy and language, too many people may not realize are linked to their health.  As our world grows more interconnected economically, socially and politically, many of these SDHs are shaped more and more by international forces like trade, immigration and climate change.  It thus behooves health educators to frame learning about health in local to global terms.

In the shorter term, the shared challenge of Learning Life and GUSM’s Community Health Division is to improve CDI families’ understanding of health, including nutrition and SDHs, and food culture, wherever they are in the world.  In the longer term, we hope to improve the health outcomes of our families worldwide.  Much that is good on this Earth takes time and patient work to happen.  That is why we are in this for the long haul.

Paul Lachelier, Ph.D.
Founder, Learning Life

References

Kaiser Family Foundation.  “Beyond Health Care: The Role of Social Determinants in Promoting Health and Health Equity.”  Chart retrieved from https://www.kff.org/disparities-policy/issue-brief/beyond-health-care-the-role-of-social-determinants-in-promoting-health-and-health-equity/ on 9/7/18.

University of North Carolina-Charlotte.  “ARCHES Mission & Goals.”  Chart retrieved from https://arches.uncc.edu/mission-goals on 9/7/18.