Morning Lecture Recaps

A larger amount of mail-in ballots for the 2020 presidential election may force states, particularly swing states, to count the ballots into the next morning. 

Emily Bazelon, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and best-selling author, said the process may be slowed even more because some states have a rule that election officials cannot count ballots until Election Day in order to prevent fraud. Many ballots may arrive at the last minute, and states have never counted a large number of mail-in ballots before. 

“There may be totally legitimate reasons why the state election officials just haven’t counted all, or even a large fraction, of the absentee ballots on election night — and we should all be ready for that,” Bazelon said.

She said the media, herself included, has a broad responsibility to prepare audiences so they understand the process of counting every ballot, “as opposed to (audiences perceiving) some evidence that something fraudulent is going on.”

“I do worry about that potential for litigation, but I think the headline going into election day is that we should all be prepared to be patient,” Bazelon said, “and obviously watching to make sure that these results are fair and legitimate and regular — but not to be worrying that if we don’t have an immediate result.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Bazelon discussed how voting was laid out by the Founding Fathers, how the pandemic and voting suppression may affect the 2020 election, and possible Constitutional amendments that can improve American democracy, as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Eight theme of “Reframing the Constitution.” Her conversation, with Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt, was titled “Voting and the Constitution.”

Ewalt asked Bazelon to explain how the right to vote is not explicitly protected in the Constitution.

Article One describes how senators and representatives will be elected, and the fourth section states that the time, places and manner of election will be determined by each state. The 14th Amendment expanded voting rights to Black Americans, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and the Voting Rights Act ensured that voters, particularly Black voters in the South, were not subject to “overt barriers” like poll taxes and literacy tests.

“What we still are lacking is a sense that there are limits to what states and localities can do to close polling places — for example, to change the way elections are shaped in a way that can affect representation,” Bazelon said.

Bazelon said the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County vs. Holder “really, in some ways, gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act,” by no longer requiring that the Justice Department approve changes to the electoral process by state and local governments. Since this decision, she said thousands of polling places have closed across the country, particularly in the South.

The U.S. has also had disputes over voter identification laws, and Bazelon said tens of thousands of votes were removed since Shelby County vs. Holder if the state and local election officials found that they were “inactive voters.”

“When you see these kinds of moves that really limit the franchise, (making) it harder for people to vote,” Bazelon said, “that makes me wonder if we had this Constitutional guarantee, (we might) be better equipped to address them.”

Ewalt then asked how the April 7, 2020, Wisconsin presidential primary was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think, unfortunately, that (the) Wisconsin primary was a full-on disaster,” Bazelon said.

She said at that time, in the face of COVID-19, election officials in Wisconsin were debating how to handle the election — whether to extend deadlines for absentee ballots and what to do about workers uncomfortable staffing the polls. Bazelon said that staffing problems may occur again in November, as volunteers tend to be older retirees who may be at higher risk of the virus. 

She said Wisconsin had never had more than 2-3% of the electorate vote by mail, but saw large increases in mail-in ballots for the primary.

“They just had a lot of trouble getting all the ballots out in time and then back in time,” Bazelon said. “Wisconsin, confusingly, doesn’t have a postmark requirement for returning absentee ballots, and so there were a lot of people whose ballots were not received by election day as the law required, and they were disenfranchised. This is upwards of 10,000 people.”

Another problem — with a lack of workers and concerns of the pandemic spreading — is that cities, such as Milwaukee, closed “almost every single polling place. So you saw a big city that usually has hundreds of polling places having only a handful,” she said.

“There were these very long lines of folks lining up to vote, having to spend hours, sometimes in the rain. This is not what we want to see on election day; that’s just way too big a burden,” Bazelon said. “Unfortunately, after the election, contact tracers found that dozens of people got the coronavirus, and that may have been linked to their either working or going to the polls.”

Ewalt asked what people should pay attention to in the courts in the near future related to voting rights.

Bazelon said dozens of lawsuits surrounding voting rights are occurring, such as the Republican National Committee having $20 million in reserve to spend on election litigation. She said that the committee is trying to challenge Nevada’s plan to give everyone an application for an absentee ballot and Pennsylvania’s plan for having secure drop-off boxes for collecting mail in order to take pressure off the United States Postal Service. 

She said Democrats are trying to increase enfranchisement; for example, if a person submits an absentee ballot and their signature does not look correct, they will have a chance to verify it, which is called signature curing. She compared this to the “hanging chads” of the 2000 presidential election, where many ballots were thrown out because of the way some voters punched their ballot. 

Ewalt asked Bazelon to expand on recent discussions about Constitutional amendments, like the renewed interest in the Equal Rights Amendment.

Bazelon said people are debating an amendment setting term limits for federal judges, who can potentially serve in their position for 40 to 50 years. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, she said they did not know people would want to be federal judges in the future.

“It was kind of a crappy job. (In those days) you had to literally ride a circuit on horseback around the original states to do your job,” Bazelon said. “It wasn’t particularly prestigious, and so life tenure was this extra benefit they were dangling in front of people. Also, (there were) very different average life expectancies than they have now.”

She said people are now chosen for the Supreme Court partly because of their ages, and the hope that they will stay for many decades.

“I would argue that’s just too much power to give a small number of people, to give nine people,” Bazelon said. “They get to have the final say of the meaning of the Constitution, and in many cases law, in this country for a very extended period of time.”

But if Supreme Court Justices had staggered, 18-year terms, then every president would appoint two judges.

“We wouldn’t have the same incredible Sturm und Drang over each single appointment, because it would be much more regularized, and that I think would also be healthy for our democracy,” Bazelon.

Additionally, Bazelon said she was originally dismissive of the effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment when the push was relaunched a few years ago.

“I have changed my tune about it, in part because I watched the show ‘Mrs. America,’ which was all about the original 1970s effort to pass the ERA. I understood much better what was at stake,” Bazelon said. “This is my own lack of knowing our nation’s history, I suppose, but I understood much more that it was this foundational fight, and what they were asking for was just to be treated equally.”

She said since the 1970s, when ERA was passed through Congress — but not 35 states — many of the demands of ERA supporters have become law, and it has been harder to discriminate based on sex in the United States. Bazelon said the new ERA may address pregnancy discrimination, and, potentially, “a more secure anchor for the right to access to abortion.”

Libertarianism is a philosophy centered on protecting private property, free markets and individual liberties. Robert Levy, chairman of the board of directors at the Cato Institute, said that libertarians tend to agree with conservatives regarding fiscal issues, and agree with liberals on social issues.

“Does that mean libertarians are philosophically inconsistent, because we agree with liberals sometimes, conservatives other times?” Levy said. “No — in fact, it’s conservatives and liberals who are inconsistent.”

The 10th Amendment says that the federal government may only exercise powers that are in the Constitution. Levy said that conservatives and libertarians tend to agree in a “tightly constrained view of the federal government, but there are a couple of key exceptions.”

Levy said that many conservatives, as opposed to libertarians, are willing to assign the federal government more responsibility, such as with hurricane relief, retirement systems and medical care. 

“Take a look at the totally effective-less war on drugs. If you look through the Constitution, you will find very few crimes mentioned: counterfeiting, treason and piracy,” Levy said. “Criminal law is typically left up to state and local governments, and yet conservatives believe because of the drug war … we can ignore that there’s no Constitutional authorization.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Levy discussed how libertarians agree and disagree with liberals and conservatives on the role of the federal government, and the powers the people and the Constitution gave the federal government, as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Eight theme of “Reframing the Constitution.” His lecture was titled “The Founding Fathers’ Vision.”

Levy said that Congress is supposed to enact laws — not the Justice Department or the Environmental Protection Agency. He said liberals would likely be against giving the Justice Department the ability to enact regulations for national security.

“When the same Congress delegates to the Environmental Protection Agency power to enact regulations, with no more guidance than to keep us safe from pollutants, the left applauds enthusiastically,” Levy said. “Now, could it be the pollutants are a greater threat than terrorists, or is it more likely that the left has this selective indignation about the role of government, reflecting an inconsistency in liberal mindset, just as there is inconsistency in the conservative mindset?”

Levy said that when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, and wrote that all men are created equal, with unalienable rights, he also wrote that governments are instituted “to secure these rights.”

“Notice he said secure, not grant,” Levy said. “He said secure. We already had the rights.”

The Constitution, Levy said, is not “a code of conduct. Its purpose is to limit the power of government, and secure individual liberties. It is not the people or the citizens that are required to obey the Constitution.”

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt. He asked Levy if federal legislation, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, oversteps the government’s responsibilities. 

Levy said federal legislation is doing more than it should, and the ADA specifically should not be regulating as much when it comes to private parties. He said that private parties should be able to negotiate “whatever employment agreements the employer and the employee agreed to.”

“While I think that it was a bad idea, remains a bad idea (and I believe) that employment relationships should be up to the private parties involved,” Levy said, “I nonetheless recognize this isn’t on the horizon, and there’s no proposal with the Cato Institute or by any of the experts at the Cato Institute to abolish the ADA, or for that matter any of the other anti-discrimination laws.”

Ewalt asked how limited government, such as one libertarians support, can deal with large issues that the Founding Fathers never thought of, like climate change.

Levy said libertarians mostly agree that climate change exists and is partly manmade, but there are some disagreements on how detrimental global warming will be, and a vast disagreement over what actions the federal government should take.

“The new green proposals by the Democratic Party … some of those cures may be worse than the disease,” Levy said. “Libertarians do not deny that the federal government has a major role to play in climate change because climate problems could consist of some people engaging in activities that have injurious effects on other people, and government has a meaningful role to step in and stop that from occurring.”

Ewalt then asked how Americans should go about educating themselves about the Constitution. 

Levy said that it is understandable for the public not to be well-versed in the Constitution; only a few years ago, Congress passed a bill requiring all members of Congress read the Constitution.

“In fact, it was read on the floor of Congress,” Levy said. “(For) some, I’m sure, that’s the first time they were exposed to the Constitution.”

He said everyone should be required to read and study the Constitution in school, and that there should be a much greater school choice. 

“If you’re going to learn about government, the last thing in the world you want is for the government to be running the school system,” Levy said. “So far, I think privatized education is a heck of a good deal, if not exclusively, at least as a supplement to public education.”

In the 1880s, suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton began writing a history of women’s suffrage — a project that was thousands of pages long. 

“It is indeed a story that is told selectively,” said Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, “and, in particular, really minimizes, downplays, overlooks — and even erases in some moments — the role that Black American women had played in the road to the 19th Amendment.”

The 19th Amendment was ratified 100 years ago to the day of Jones’ Chautauqua lecture, and she said many will hear retellings of history that are closer to myths than facts. One of these myths is that the 19th Amendment gave American women the right to vote.

“It’s fair to say that no one gives American women the vote in 1920. As some commentators have put it, American women take the vote,” Jones said. “The Constitutional amendment is a decades-long battle waged by American women in the face of fears and recalcitrant opposition.”

In addition to her work at Johns Hopkins, Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, she gave a lecture titled “The Rare Few Times the Constitution Has Been Amended,” as part of Week Eight of the Chautauqua Lecture Series theme on “Reframing the Constitution.” Jones discussed the history of voter suppression before and after the ratification of the 19th Amendment and current laws that keep American, particularly Black Americans, from the polls.

Jones said that the 19th Amendment states that a person’s sex is no longer a legitimate criteria for voting, and the word “male” was removed from U.S. voting laws. 

“Of course, there’s no guarantee in that provision. There’s no promise. There’s no requirement,” Jones said. “American women will still be kept from the polls after August of 1920 by age requirements, by residency requirements, by mental competency requirements; all of these things will continue to mediate women’s voting rights, even as sex is no longer permissible by law.”

She said that while the 15th Amendment states that race cannot be used as a criteria for voting, Southern and some western states made laws that successfully kept Black Americans from the polls. These laws included poll taxes, which was an annual fee for voters, and literacy texts, which required voters to read and provide an interpretation from the Constitution — either the federal one or an individual state’s Constitution.

“If any of you have lately looked at your Constitution and contemplated the complexity of something like the Electoral College,” Jones said, “you’ll know that many of us could not explain that provision of the Constitution, even if we could recite the words.”

Another was the Grandfather Clause, a law, Jones said, that permitted only people whose grandfather had voted before the end of the Civil War to vote. Jones said this ensured that the descendants of slaves could not vote, as the 15th Amendment was passed after the Civil War. She also said that unchecked intimidation and lynching forced many Black men away from the polls. 

“When we ask, ‘Did all American women win the vote in 1920?’ The answer is assuredly, ‘No,’” Jones said. “African-American women in too many states become equals to their fathers and their husbands, their sons, their brothers, but at the same time, they are equal only in the sense that they are equally disenfranchised, equally going to be kept from the polls.”

One example Jones gave was that, after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, officials in Kent County, Delaware, refused Black women who failed the literacy tests. And in Savannah, Georgia, election judges ruled that women were not allowed to vote because of a state law that stated voters had to be residents of a state for six months before the election, and the 19th Amendment had not been in place for six months at that time. 

Jones said Southern and western lawmakers devised laws that targeted Black women because they feared they would vote in high numbers. She said during this time, white women did not register and vote at a high rate, but Black women did, even before 1920 in states — including California and New York — where women could vote.

“African-American women had been coming to the polls for years,” Jones said. “They had proven themselves to be committed voters, proven themselves to be organized and savvy enough to overcome registration hurdles.”

In Florida, Black women created clubs that prepared one another to register and vote on Election Day. Throughout Florida, Jones said that the Klu Klux Klan organized violence against Black voters to keep them from the polls. In the city of Daytona, Jones said the terrorist organization staged an open rally, which the local paper publicized, and went from the center of the city to Bethune Cookman University in the heart of the African-American community. At Bethune, Jones said the Klan tried to intimidate the many Black college students, and community members, to prevent them from going to the polls. 

Jones said voter suppression laws currently exist, with voter ID requirements and the closing of polling stations. While these laws are “neutral on their face,” as Jones said, so were the laws that suppressed Black voters in the 1920s — and they are having a disproportionate effect on Black voters.

“I’m not a historian who thinks nothing has changed,” Jones said. “There’s too much in the story between 1920 and 2020 for us to blindly suggest that nothing has changed, even as we continue to face struggles over voting rights in our own time.”

The lecture then transitioned to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Chief of Staff and Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Shannon D. Rozner. Rozner asked Jones to comment on Sen. Kamala Harris being chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate in the presidential election. 

Jones said a lot of people commented on Harris being the first Black American woman and the first Indian-American woman to be a presidential running mate for a major party. 

“I’m someone who really thinks it’s time to retire the distinction of ‘the first,’” Jones said. “I think where we are, is in a new historical moment, one in which African-American women are emerging really as a force, rather than as first.”

Harris was among six other vice presidential hopefuls who were Black women, and Jones said around 120 Black women will run for Congress this year, which is up from 40 in 2018. 

“That tells us that African-American women are no longer tokens, are no longer ‘first.’ They have broken, if you will, the glass ceilings, and are now coming into American politics to lead,” Jones said. “I think what Sen. Harris exemplifies and gives us an opportunity to learn more about is, what does it mean when African-American women lead in American politics?”

Rozner asked Jones to react to the breaking news that President Donald Trump would pardon suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who was arrested for voting in 1872. 

“What a cynical move that is on the part of the president, when we are in the midst of wholly fumbly access to the polls for so many Americans, including American women, in November,” Jones said.

Jones said there are people in better positions to speak on Anthony’s behalf, but she thinks that Anthony would be “decrying this administration for its unwillingness to guarantee our access to the polls in November.”

“Her arrest was a badge of honor. In many ways it was a merit badge for an activist of her generation; perhaps it’s still a merit badge today for activists,” Jones said. “I’m not convinced that Susan Anthony would welcome the pardon from Donald Trump in 2020.”

Founding Father James Madison wanted to create a Constitutional system that ensured that reason prevailed over passion and prevented large assemblies from making hasty decisions. 

“That is why it is so difficult in the U.S. to pass a law or to amend the Constitution; you have to jump through lots of hoops to pass a law,” said Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center. 

An amendment to the Constitution has to be proposed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or two-thirds of the states have to call a special convention, then it has to be ratified by three-quarters of the states and signed by the president. Rosen said that the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid the creation of factions, which Madison defined as a group, either a majority or minority, that is dedicated to passion and self interest, rather than reason and public good. 

Madison thought that the size of the U.S. was an advantage, in that it made it hard for factions to organize themselves. Rosen said the original drafters of the Constitution, also called the framers, thought that elected representatives would ensure that the wisest people would pick the best policies.

“(The framers thought) it’ll be hard for passionate factions to mobilize, but it will allow cool representatives to deliberate in the public (eye),” Rosen said. “Sound like politics today? Well, of course, it doesn’t sound like politics today.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 17, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Rosen discussed how some of the Founding Fathers’ ideals are not followed in present-day politics, as well as how the the U.S. government has changed since its founding, to open the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Eight theme of “Reframing the Constitution.”

Madison’s idea that the size of the U.S. would make factions harder to form no longer applies, Rosen said, because technology makes it easy to find and organize with like-minded people. And on Facebook, fake news often reaches more people than real news. 

“People are more likely to share a post with inaccurate information and a really inflammatory headline without reading it, just because it seems so outrageous,” Rosen said. 

Rosen said that historians have found that the U.S. is the most polarized it has been since the Civil War. 

“In 1960 in Congress, there was a 50% overlap between the most liberal Republican and the most conservative Democrats,” Rosen said. “Today, there is zero overlap. It means that both parties are much more extreme than they were before, and are much less likely to find common ground.”

Since the Constitution was drafted, Rosen said that political parties have risen, which Madison did not anticipate. Because everyone recognized George Washington as “someone who is above party,” Rosen said, the framers — including Madison and Alexander Hamilton — assumed that legislators would do their work without the influence of political parties. 

“Almost as soon as the system got started, it began to operate in a way that was different than the framers expected — and that was because of the rise of parties,” Rosen said.

Rosen said that discussing and listening in person is no longer how Congress makes decisions. 

“The parties are so polarized, they’re refusing to deliberate. They’re putting through major legislation on party-line votes,” Rosen said. “Both the major achievements of President Obama and President Trump, the Affordable Care Act and the tax cut, passed with zero votes from the other side.”

But this was not the case as recently as 2006, he said, when the expansion of the Voting Rights Act passed with large bipartisan support under President George W. Bush, but then “the Supreme Court struck that down in the Shelby County case.”

“Whether you agree with the majority or the dissent in the Shelby County case, it’s pretty striking, isn’t it, that as recently as 2006 we could have major bipartisan legislation?” Rosen said.

Further, the powers of the president are different than what Madison originally believed they should be. The Constitution itself gives the president very few powers, but Article Two gives the president the power to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to ensure laws are faithfully executed and to nominate ambassadors, judges and other officials with the consent of the Senate. 

Rosen said that from President Ronald Reagan to President Donald Trump, the number of executive orders issued by presidents has risen. He said that the Supreme Court has challenged executive orders, such as Obama’s executive order that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and Trump’s executive order to phase out the program.

The framers, including Hamilton, who Rosen called “the rap star of the moment” due to the musical Hamilton, supported judicial review of laws. In the musical, and real life, Hamilton believed that judges should choose the will of the Constitution, which he said represented the will of the people, over ordinary laws, which represented the will of legislators. 

But people disagree if the original Constitution truly represents the will of everyone. 

“Not everyone agrees that the original Constitution, passed by a bunch of white men, many of whom were slaveholders in Philadelphia, from which African Americans and women and other groups were excluded, … does represent the will of the people,” Rosen said. 

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill. As the National Constitution Center recently partnered with The Atlantic for a project called “The Battle for the Constitution,” which argues that the nation is in a fourth battle over the document, Hill asked Rosen about the first three battles, and why he believes a new battle is occuring. 

Rosen said the first three battles were the American Revolution, the Civil War and the New Deal, and each represented a moment of rethinking principles. The Revolutionary War led to the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, then the Constitution — because the framers wanted a central government strong enough to control the country’s defense and economy, while being constrained enough to protect individual rights.

The Civil War, which Rosen called the second battle of the Constitution, led to the end of slavery and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The third battle, the New Deal, centered around the Supreme Court giving President Franklin Roosevelt broader federal powers in order to give economic aid.

Rosen said the fourth and current battle revolves around whether certain agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Protection Bureau and the United States Postal Service, should have broad scope in which to operate. He said the outcome of the presidential election will decide if this battle continues or is resolved.

Hill then asked what Rosen’s prognosis was on the divisiveness of the present moment, and what the average person should be looking at more closely.

“(We need to) move past an age of Twitter, and the cable news and making quick decisions by a soundbite, and just take the time to sit down together and look each other in the eye,” Rosen said. “Your wonderful questions and your willingness to listen to my attempts at answers are what give me hope.”

Billye is a Giant Pacific Octopus who lives in the Seattle Aquarium. Billye and other octopodes have learned to open jars — they can even open medicine bottles with childproof lids. 

“While (octopodes) have a good-sized central brain, two-thirds of their neurons are in their eight arms controlling hundreds of suckers,” said Flynn Coleman, author and international human rights attorney. “They use distributed intelligence to perform multiple tasks simultaneously and independently: something that the human brain cannot do.”

Much of the conversation around artificial intelligence is how machines can mimic the human brain, which Coleman said is thought to be the “gold standard” for organic intelligence. While the human brains have a lot of promise due to their complexity, they also present problems.

“We do not fully understand our own brains, nor do we even have a universally accepted definition of what human intelligence is,” Coleman said. “We don’t know exactly why we sleep or dream. We don’t know how we process memories. We don’t know whether we have free will, or what consciousness is or who has it.”

Coleman said these unknowns make the task of coding a human brain very difficult, so scientists may have to look toward minds of other species, such as octopodes. She said Billye’s distributed approach to problem solving may be well suited to making robots that explore distant planets.

“The range of skill ingenuity and creativity of our biological brethren on this planet is astounding,” Coleman said. “We have a proclivity to only weigh their intelligence and skill in relation to our own. This human-centric view is limiting at best and dangerous at worst.”

Coleman is the author of A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are and has worked with the United Nations, the United States federal government and organizations around the world. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 14, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, she discussed how people can make AI more empathetic, as well as the importance of non-human intelligence, to close the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Seven theme of “The Science of Us.”

Coleman said the original computer — the human brain — has 100 billion neurons and 2.5 petabytes of memory, and has served humans for around 100,000 years.

“It is hard to overlook that it needs constant fueling to perform at even minimal levels,” Coleman said. “We all know how notoriously slow it can be to boot up in the morning.”

She said people are becoming more reliant on machines and more immersed in virtual life.

“A new era is upon us, and our lives are so seamlessly merging with the digital world that many of us don’t even notice,” Coleman said. “That is, until a global pandemic thrust us into a primarily digital existence, exposing both the promise and the frailties of the technological systems we have.”

These frailties include many people having no access to a laptop or a smartphone, according to Coleman. She also said that society is more focused on advancing technology and creating AI that is better at predicting outcomes, than how these tools will define the lives of current and future generations. 

To address concerns about technology, Coleman said people need to address their own assumptions about the world, and “paradoxically, we also need to ask what technology can teach us about being human.”

Almost every major human achievement has been the result of our ability to collaborate, not the genius of some individuals, according to Coleman. 

“Experts can often be the worst forecasters because they can be dogmatically siloed in their fields, and invested in being right,” Coleman said. “However, beginners, who have a fresh take without a stake in being the best, can often help us see what specialists cannot.”

Coleman said the technology mirrors its designers, and that a diverse group of participants is necessary in creating a fair and ethical AI. 

“AI and computerization will be the biggest disruptors in the history of labor economies, and the challenges of the fast-spreading novel coronavirus have exposed the inequities in our societies, and how many essential workers are significantly undervalued and excluded,” Coleman said. “We’re going to have to reimagine our relationships with work and tap into our innate sagacity and creativity to navigate this brave new world.”

Along with octopodes, Coleman said other animals have incredible intelligence, from the memories of pigeons, spiders spinning webbed balloons to fly, and bees using dance to communicate complex information to their colonies.  

“This is possibly the last frontier of scientific invention — maybe our chance to embrace our human limitations and to expand our worldview beyond ourselves,” Coleman said. “The science of us must have the broadest possible definition. Being willing to admit other species are brilliant could be the smartest thing we can do.”

Coleman said that part of building better AI is looking at humans’ worst tendencies and improving society. 

“We don’t need to save ourselves from robots, we need to save robots from ourselves today,” Coleman said.

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Vice President of Marketing and Communications Emily Morris. Morris asked Coleman how her work as a human rights attorney connects to her work with technology.

Coleman worked with the Genocide Prevention Center in 2001, where they used satellites to look for evidence of war crimes, such as mass burial cites. 

“I kept thinking it’s not enough, because everyone is already dead and gone,” Coleman said. “While it’s so important to have a record of abuse and the things that have happened, the worst things we can do to each other, I thought, ‘How can we do more?’”

Coleman then looked into artificial intelligence and saw the field needed a human right’s perspective, which led her to writing A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are.

Morris asked Coleman how the average person could get involved with making ethical AI.

Coleman said that the fields of programming and other technology are not the only aspects of society that need more inclusion; it’s needed at “every echelon of leadership” from the school boards to local government.

“We can, inch by inch, brick by brick, take tiny actions every single day. Your life is a million tiny moments, mostly unseen,” Coleman said. “How can you serve another today? How can you care for someone else? How can you amplify someone else’s voice? How can you stand up for social justice with whatever skills you have at hand?”

Before Kent Nerburn became an author, he was a wood sculptor. He changed his career after being hired in northern Minnesota to help high school students conduct a two-year oral history project interviewing Red Lake Ojibwe elders in 1988.

“I soon realized that I was in the presence of a way of living and believing that had a depth unlike any I had experienced in my typical American way of growing up,” Nerburn said. “And it was a way that perfectly fit my hunger for a spirituality that honored the mystery and life, but did not demand exclusivity or divide people between insiders and outsiders.”

After being struck by the suppressed history and worldview the Ojibwe elders described, he has written 17 books on the Ojibwe, Lakota and Nez Perce tribes. Nerburn’s lecture, “Quiet Voices, Important Truths: Life Lessons from the Native Way,” was released at 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 12, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Nerburn recorded his lecture from his Oregon home, as part of Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Spirituality of Us.” He reflected on his career switch and lessons he has learned from listening to and writing about Native American history, culture and spirituality.

When Nerburn was still a wood sculptor, he felt almost guilty for carving his ideas into trees. To him, it felt like he was imposing ideas onto something with a living soul. And for many Native Americans, there is a life force in trees. Nerburn said the Iroquois have carved masks from live trees so the spirit of the tree is imbued in the mask. Some tribes on the northwest coast of British Columbia carve faces in trees and then let the faces change as the tree grows.

Nerburn’s work collecting and sharing Native stories for the past 30 years isn’t done, which means he’s not done learning, either.

“There are so many stories I could tell, and so many stories I am still learning,” Nerburn said.

He first came across the work of Native philosophers and leaders while working with the Ojibwe students in 1988. He quoted Dakota philosopher Ohiyesa, also known as Charles Eastman:

“We have always preferred to believe that the spirit of God is not breathed into humans alone, but that the whole created universe shares in the immortal perfection of its maker,” Eastman wrote. “We believe that the spirit pervades all creation and that every creature possesses a soul of some degree, though not necessarily a soul conscious of itself. … We see no need for the setting apart of one day and seven as a holy day. For to us, all days belong to God.”

Nerburn found his purpose in listening to and sharing the stories and lessons from Native people, opening a door for the rest of the world to learn with him from Native American perspectives and life lessons he details in his work. In his lecture, he read two sections from his book Voices in the Stones: Life Lessons from the Native Way.

In one section, “Stones for the Sweat: All People Should Be Made to Feel Needed,” he described a Nez Perce man’s account of his ancestor Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph. The man also described responsibilities for children and elders when he was a child. While children were tasked with braiding horse bridles, elders made community decisions based on their breadth of life experiences.

“It granted them an unassailable status and responsibility that belonged to them and no one else,” Nerburn read.

In the second section, “The Old Man in the Café: Spirit is Present in All of Creation,” Nerburn described his chance encounter in a café with a Native man who in his youth had been forcibly sent to the Fort Totten Indian Boarding School, which Nerburn was researching at the time. The U.S. government created schools like Fort Totten to forcibly assimilate Native American children.

“I learned Good English,” the man said to Nerburn. “I learned Good Christian. But I am no longer myself.”

Children who were initially taught to learn from their elders were forced into these schools to learn the ways of the dominant U.S. culture and Christian religion. White teachers told children that their elders would go to hell for their beliefs.

“This man, for all his class and manner and sanguine outlook, was the very embodiment of what we as a nation had done to the Native peoples, who had stood in our path as we pushed our way across the continent,” Nerburn read.

Part of Nerburn’s work requires him to unwind the United States’ systemic damage done to Native Americans and Native values. In his research, Nerburn found out a government leader in charge of Native training and education in the 1870s had said that the Indians need to learn the “exalted egotism of America” — in other words, to think of “I” rather than “we.”

Nerburn said that while Native Americans have worked to uphold this value of “we,” the rest of the United States has yet to learn this, especially in light of some people who refuse to wear masks or practice social distancing to prevent COVID-19 transmission.

Nerburn sees an opportunity during the pandemic for everyone to reconsider societal priorities and values; to look out for group needs rather than individual needs.

“Every child in America right now is being influenced by (the pandemic),” Nerburn said. “When we get through this — if we don’t sacrifice them all on the altar of normality by sending them back to school or putting them in bad situations — every kid in the world that went through this will have something in common with every other kid. And as their time comes, they’ll remember that and look at themselves as part of the human family.”

Nerburn’s work calls people to pay attention and listen to Native stories. After speaking with Native people for 30 years, there is one phrase that he’s heard over and over again: White people need to listen.

“The first thing we need to do is to stop controlling and start to listen,” Nerburn said. “And that takes away the sense of responsibility for mastery. I think that’s really the key to the Native way of understanding — to accept rather than to master.”

Some people think of race, as science journalist Angela Saini said, “as a biological entity, something that resides within your body.” But this idea could not be further from the truth, and racial categories that people use now were created during the time of the European Enlightenment. Philosophers and naturalists of this era were categorizing the natural world, so Saini said they did the same with humans.

“They were doing this with a huge absence of knowledge, because of course many of these people had not traveled the world,” Saini said. “They didn’t understand, for example, how to separate culture and language from biology or genetics.”

Saini said that these categories were almost-randomly created, with some people believing that there were a few races, and others that there were thousands. Before the Enlightenment, she said that the word “race” was used in reference to small tribes or families. Race now commonly refers to continents of people “united under one biological banner.”

“We try and read by race using genetics, and we always fail,” Saini said.

As well as being a journalist, Saini is the author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, which traces the history of long-held beliefs of biological racial differences in the world of science. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Saini was in conversation with Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt on the topic “The Return of Race Science.” Their conversation was part of Week Seven of the Chautauqua Lecture Series, themed “The Science of Us.” Saini discussed the origins of the social construct of race, the history of racial science and its lingering threads in science and politics.

Ewalt asked why doctors tell patients that different races are more predisposed to certain illnesses.

Saini said that the difference between humans is not random, and people are more genetically related to their family. The more extended the relationship between family members, she said, the weaker the genetic relationship. 

“Historically, we have tended to live near kin. This isn’t so much the case for people these days,” Saini said. “Certainly not in my case, because I’m the children of immigrants — but historically, people have tended to live in the place where their ancestors have lived.”

When people live for generations in the same area or village, Saini said people could tell which village an individual was from slight, physical traits. As people looked at bigger areas, such as states and countries, these genetic similarities went away quickly. 

“When you get to the continental level, which is the level at which we’re talking about racial differences, then it’s almost meaningless,” Saini said. “It has almost no statistical power whatsoever.”

Saini said that racial differences are often brought up in health, such as the sickle cell trait. Black Americans have higher rates of the trait than white Americans, so she said many people assumed that it was a result of race. Saini said that the sickle cell trait is not unique to Black people; the trait is traced to areas of the world where malaria is common, because it provides a resistance to the virus. 

“It is not a racialized condition. It’s only because of the demographics of the U.S. that it looks like a racialized condition,” Saini said. “Even then, it is not common enough or prevalent enough in only Black Americans to justify different health policies.”

Ewalt asked Saini to discuss the origins of race science.

“It is made real by politics. That is how race works,” Saini said. 

Saini said scientists sometimes treat social constructs, like gender, as biological instead of cultural. Naturalist Charles Darwin, for example, noticed that women had different jobs than men, so he concluded that women were less evolved and naturally less intelligent than men. 

When you have, for hundreds of years, used the premise of race as the basis for studying human difference, you can’t abandon that overnight,” Saini said. “Even though you may be committed to this idea of anti-racism, even though you may not be a eugenicist anymore, you don’t shed that baggage overnight. It lingers in the way that you think about people.”

“Of course, there is no scientific connection there,” Saini said, “just an observation he’s made culturally, and then drawn a kind of scientific conclusion out of it.”

Ewalt asked how race science developed after World War II.

Saini said that many 19th-century race scientists had ungrounded ideas around race — for example, the idea that Black people who escaped from their enslavers were ill, as it was assumed at the time that “to be enslaved was a kind of natural condition of Black people.”

She said that after the Holocaust showed what happens when eugenics is “taken to its horrific logical conclusion, which is such a race is inferior, how do we eliminate them,” the global scientific community moved race out of biology and into social sciences. 

“When you have, for hundreds of years, used the premise of race as the basis for studying human difference, you can’t abandon that overnight,” Saini said. “Even though you may be committed to this idea of anti-racism, even though you may not be a eugenicist anymore, you don’t shed that baggage overnight. It lingers in the way that you think about people.”

Saini said one such anti-racist scientist was Luka Cavalli Swartz, one of the founders of the field of population genetics. When Saini talked to Swartz before his death in 2018, she said he referred to mixed-raced people as “hybrids,” which she said is “completely the inappropriate language because, of course, we are not different breeds.”

“I still see that phrase being used in far-right circles and by scientific racists today, and yet here was this anti-racist scientist using that kind of language,” Saini said. “That is the problem that we have, but even in very well-intentioned people within the sciences, there is that lingering remnant of thinking about people in this kind of racialized way.”

Ewalt asked how else race science can be seen in 2020.

Saini said the use of racial categories as biological ones can be seen within the COVID-19 pandemic. With differences in deaths and critical infections between racial categories in the U.S. and United Kingdom, she said prominent geneticists and medical researchers are publicly speculating that there might be a genetic reason for the difference. 

Saini said that Black Americans have always experienced racial disparities in health, including dying of “almost everything at greater rates than white Americans.” She also said that “many, if not most” people socially defined as Black in the U.S. have mixed ancestry. 

“How plausible is it to say that this very diverse group of people, socially defined as Black, are so genetically disadvantaged that they will die of everything at greater rates than everybody else? That just doesn’t make any logical sense,” Saini said. “You don’t even need to be an epidemiologist to know that that doesn’t make logical sense.”

Ewalt then asked Saini about her interactions with scientists who believe they are truly objective, and do not acknowledge their bias.

Saini said that she has met many scientists who readily admit that science in the past was biased, and that race science and eugenics are pseudosciences. But those same people are not able to admit that current scientists might have bias and are affected by politics. 

“So many scientists still behave as though they sit above culture, not like any other human being,” Saini said, “almost like an ethereal, deity-like creature that isn’t affected by what’s going on in the rest of the world.”

As a journalist, she is alarmed when a person tells her they are perfectly objective.

“When somebody says that to me, I know that I have to be careful, because that means they’re not examining their own biases; that means they’re not taking them into account, and they’re much more likely to make mistakes,” Saini said. “It is possible, theoretically possible at least, to achieve objectivity, but only by examining your own biases and taking them into account.”

Saini then talked about her own biases. While she was working on Superior, she expected scientists to tell her that there were loose ties between the color of someone’s skin and their health. Instead scientists told her, “‘This is just nonsense, racist nonsense.’ High-level geneticists telling me again and again that there is absolutely no tangibility to this idea.”

“That was, for me, a real shock to my sense of identity,” Saini said. “I’ve had emails from people, especially children of immigrants like myself or immigrants like myself, who feel that there’s something deep down that connects them to the place that their ancestors are from. That there’s something within them, that makes them who they are.”

The internet allows anyone to spread information easily — this includes conspiracy theories. Social media has also changed the nature of conspiracy theories, as Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, said different websites incentivize engagement, keeping people’s attention, as well as quick, emotional responses. This is where QAnon enters.

LaFrance said that the premise of QAnon is that “a secret and powerful cabal of evil, high-profile Democrats is running a global child sex ring, and that Donald Trump is the savior figure that will eventually free them.” QAnon started on the internet in October 2017 with posts on 4Chan — one of the most famous theories was that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be arrested soon. She was not arrested, but these posts generated a lot of attention and a following around Q, a figure who drops clues online that disciples or followers attempt to piece together. Clues are sometimes posted multiple times a day.

“There’s a narrative that is evolving, that really lends an air of legitimacy to the conspiracy theory, that a lot of its followers have seized upon,” LaFrance said. “They see these posts and assume that because it’s happening in real time, it must be true.”

The more she talked to people who believed in QAnon, the more she realized they were “deriving a sense of faith and serenity, and almost religious satisfaction, from the conspiracy theory. It’s a belief system, and it looks a lot like a new religion.”

LaFrance wrote The Atlantic’s June cover story about QAnon, and has reported on misinformation and media for more than 15 years. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, LaFrance gave a lecture titled “The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning,” as part of Week Seven of the Chautauqua Lecture Series, themed “The Science of Us.” The lecture was co-sponsored by the Chautauqua Women’s Club as part of their Contemporary Issues Forum. LaFrance discussed the origins of the internet conspiracy theory and the harms it has caused, her experience talking to theorists, and what society and individuals can do to promote a healthier democracy.

Over her time reporting on QAnon, LaFrance has learned of beliefs that the moon landing was faked, COVID-19 is a bioweapon unleashed on the world by China and the “deep state,” and one man told her that John F. Kennedy Jr. did not die in a plane crash, but was assassinated by Hillary Clinton.

“I asked this gentleman, ‘What evidence do you possibly have to support that such a thing could have happened?’ He didn’t miss a beat. He said, ‘What evidence do you have to say that it didn’t?’” LaFrance said. “We are living through a mass rejection of reasons, a mass rejection of enlightenment values. People are breaking with reality at an alarming scale.”

LaFrance said that conspiracy theories are nothing new; in 1775, Samuel Adams told the Continental Congress that King George III was taxing the colonists to turn them into slaves. 

“This is to say nothing of actual slavery taking place at the time. There’s no evidence to suggest that this plot was actually a part of King George’s taxation attempts,” LaFrance said.
“(But) it gathered a ton of steam, and people believed it.”

Watergate was also considered a conspiracy theory, until that conspiracy was proven true.

“The difference, of course, is that investigative journalism requires the confirmation of facts before publication,” LaFrance said. “Conspiracy theorizing can be referred to as investigating when it’s merely connecting unrelated events, people and ideas, and saying that they have closer ties than they actually do no evidence required.”

LaFrance cited political scientist Joseph Uscinski, who said a person’s likelihood of believing conspiracy theories can be determined how they agree with four statements: Much of society is controlled by secret plots, a few people will always be in charge in American democracy, the people who the country are not known to the voters, and a small, secret group of people determine events like wars, recessions and elections. The more a person agrees with these statements, and how intensely they agree with them, Uscinski says the more prone they are to believing conspiracies.

“When people talk about why a person might believe in conspiracy theories, they often refer to a feeling of being out of control and wanting to impose order on a chaotic world, or wanting to explain away something awful that’s happened,” LaFrance said.

LaFrance said that President Donald Trump is a conspiracy theorist and actively promotes these theories. This can be seen 10 years ago, when he said that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. LaFrance said newsrooms debated for a long time on how to cover conspiracy theories, and she thought that people would naturally see conspiracies as a way of getting attention. She believed that if journalists ignore these theories and covered more important topics, truth would prevail. 

“Fast forward to today,” LaFrance said. “Donald Trump is the president of the United States, and he still actively promotes conspiracy theories.”

One example LaFrance gave was of Trump retweeting an image in March from Dan Scavino, White House deputy chief of staff, that showed Trump playing a violin. LaFrance said many people saw this image as an “echo of Nero, they thought it was an image of a president fiddling while the world burned;” but the phrase at the top of the image, “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming,” is a popular reference in the QAnon community. 

“They saw the president tweeting this and saw it as not just a wink or a nod, but a direct acknowledgement of their conspiracy theory and their worldview,” LaFrance said.

LaFrance said she was wrong to think that conspiracy theories would go away if people ignored them, and “to dismiss them today requires a willful blindness at a time when they’re really dangerous.”

She said individuals can help combat conspiracy theories by sharing facts respectfully, not mocking theorists and earnestly asking them questions, such as, “How many people would have to be in on this in order for it to be true?” On a societal level, LaFrance said it is very helpful to have a healthy democracy, which can be achieved by promoting an independent free press, supporting human rights and ensuring people understand how to guard against biases.

LaFrance also said that a handful of tech companies have a “stunning amount of power over our lives.”

“People often treat the internet as fully baked, like it’s finished, like the internet that we have now is the one that we will forever have,” LaFrance said. “That’s just not the case. We could rebuild this thing entirely. Maybe we should.”

LaFrance said while companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon make people’s lives easier, more convenient and sometimes richer, they have a lot of control over their consumers.

“These companies can control the information you see; they control how that’s different from the information a person sitting right next to you on a different device might see, even if you Google the same thing,” LaFrance said. “They can toy with our emotions, as Facebook’s own research has shown. They can influence the outcomes of elections.”

LaFrance said alongside the large amount of misinformation on the internet, platforms treat facts and fiction neutrally. She said people should acknowledge that the internet and the “democratization of publishing” has allowed for many marginalized voices to be heard.

“I don’t envy these companies. This is a hugely, hugely complicated problem. The scale of this problem, the scale required to fix it, it’s unprecedented in human history,” LaFrance said. “We’re talking about billions of people who use a single publishing platform. It’s like a magazine with 2 billion editors. It’s really a nightmare.”

LaFrance said that the web may change in the 2020s or 2030s through reinvention or regulation, and that the health of institutions that promote democracy may improve.

“Even then, conspiracy theories will be with us and conspiracy theorists will be among us,” LaFrance said. “They will, as they always have, warp and stretch to fit our informational environments or technological realities and our world.”

The lecture then transitioned to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Vice President for Advancement Geof Follansbee. He asked LaFrance about the damage conspiracy theories have caused.

LaFrance talked about Pizzagate, which was a predecessor to QAnon, in which a young man believed a local pizzeria in Washington D.C. was the headquarters of the group of powerful Democrats who were running an underground sex ring. This man did not find what he was looking for and, despite gunshots and an encounter with the police, no one was injured. He was sent to federal jail.

“I think that one gentleman’s case is a really important one, because it shows how well he took a really reckless action,” LaFrance said. “He’s also a victim of conspiracy theorizing himself, and he really believed that this was true, and was surprised to find that it wasn’t.”

LaFrance said that the man regretted endangering people, but still believed in the conspiracy and that the “the intel on that wasn’t 100%.”

Follansbee asked how LaFrance built trust among conspiracy theorists in order to report on them. 

LaFrance said that many QAnon theorists are against the media, so they did not trust her because she was a reporter. She also found that those in a position to profit off the conspiracy, such as YouTubers with large audiences and those selling merchandise, were less likely to talk to her. The ones who were happy to talk to her were the people who earnestly believed in the conspiracy and wanted to spread the message. 

“I interviewed one woman in March, and she suggested … ‘Look at the pandemic. This is proof that the apocalypse has arrived,’” LaFrance said. “The conspiracy theorists will use that to support their worldview, but they will use any data point to support their own view.”

There is an almost-universal desire among COVID-19 patients and their families to share their stories. One such person is Rosa Hernandez, a grandmother in her 70s who had a tough battle with the disease. Sheri Fink, an investigative journalist and author, said that Hernandez is a very private person and does not use social media, but wanted to help people by telling her story. She said “show it all. Show me at my worst because I want people to understand.” 

“She’s paying her bills by phone, and she told me yesterday that she’s … engaging the operators in long discussions of what she went through and trying to advise them as a grandma, like, ‘Don’t put yourself at risk. Don’t go to the bars,’” said Fink, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The New York Times.

Fink has been able to access and report on places like the Houston Methodist Hospital, the Brooklyn Hospital Center and Long Island Jewish Northwell System. She said the hospitals that allow reporters through their doors are typically the places that are doing a good job, and that they trust the reporter’s work and fairness. Health care workers, Fink said, also know that everyone makes mistakes, including themselves, and typically join the field to help others.

“They go into health care because they want to do good, and they believe that opening the doors, in this case, will help to raise awareness, will help to dispel, to the extent possible, the rumors or misconceptions — like coronavirus doesn’t exist or it doesn’t cause severe illness,” Fink said. “These people who work in the hospitals are so pained by that.”

Fink said that doctors are learning more about COVID-19, like that many patients who had acute symptoms of the virus are still experiencing effects of the virus months after contracting it. Some hospitals are creating clinics for post-COVID syndrome, and she said masks are being found to be increasingly effective at keeping down the reproductive rate of the virus.

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Fink held a conversation with Chautauqua Institution Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt, titled “Inside the Science of and Response to COVID-19,” as part of Week Seven of the Chautauqua Lecture Series themed “The Science of Us.” Fink discussed what she learned through reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic at different hospitals, how personal stories can reflect the statistics of the virus and help people understand different aspects of the crisis, as well as what the general public and lawmakers need to keep in mind with future pandemics. 

Ewalt asked what the public doesn’t understand about the science of a new pathogen.

Fink said that people need to understand that when scientists are researching complex topics, such as COVID-19, they will continually discover new information and disprove claims that were previously widely accepted. 

“Early on we heard, ‘Don’t wear a mask.’ Then we heard, ‘Wear a mask,’” Fink said. “We’ve heard different things that have been tried; that seems promising.”

Fink said that a medicine or practice can only be considered effective when studied and agreed upon by many different scientists. 

“This is normal — we should expect to have some twists and turns in what we learn,” Fink said. “We should expect that something we know today, we might be told tomorrow that, actually, that wasn’t right.”

Ewalt asked why personal stories are important, alongside statistics, to understand the impact COVID-19. 

“I guess it’s just how we’re wired as humans when we would tell stories around the campfire,” Fink said. “Those individual stories are powerful, and they’re emotional and they can communicate a lot more than just a number.”

Fink said journalists have to choose to cover personal stories that reflect the numbers. She also said that the pandemic and individual experiences can be captured in many different mediums.  

“I’m a word person, but there’s something about hearing people’s voices,” Fink said, “(and) seeing what they looked like before they were patients in the hospital that I think is so, so powerful.”

Ewalt then asked about the unequal death tolls of COVID-19, particularly among the most vulnerable in the United States, and how it relates to systemic issues in health care. 

Fink said that there has been a lot of coverage on the disproportionate toll the virus is having on communities of color. The New York Times published an article recently on the high proportion of the Latinx community in Houston in intensive care units, with whole families falling ill. Fink said that there are multiple factors on why some communities are more affected, such as not wanting to go to the hospital immediately, medical bills, historic negative experiences and multi-generational households that cannot social distance. 

“Sometimes it takes a crisis to really make all of us more aware of things that were very inequitable for a long time,” Fink said. “We’re seeing that sort of magnifying impact of health care problems in certain communities.”

At a hospital during a week in July, employees found that 60% of the patients in the Coronavirus ICU were Hispanic, whereas the overall hospital population was 16% Hispanic. 

Ewalt asked about the science of a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the general public can better understand what’s to come.

Fink has reported more on hospitals than clinical trials and vaccine development, but she said all the experts she has spoken to have been “pretty optimistic that we could have an effective vaccine.” She also said that there are important ethical questions around who gets priority for a vaccine on a global, national and local scale. Fink said there are many options of who to give the vaccine to first, such as the most vulnerable populations, younger generations in order to reduce the prevalence of the virus in multiple communities, or health care workers who are on the frontlines. 

“Many public health officials are thinking about how to ensure that there is trust and that people will actually accept that vaccine at a level that will help protect the population,” Fink said.

Some experts call COVID-19 a “starter pandemic” that is not as deadly as many other potential pathogens. Ewalt asked what has been learned about the American government’s — and the world’s — ability to combat a crisis, and what can be done better in the future.

Fink said other pandemics will happen in the future, and that it would be very smart to make investments to combat them. In the past with outbreaks of SARS, MERS and other types of coronaviruses, which are viruses that spread from animals to people, investments tend to stagnate after the immediate emergency ends.

“We hear over and over again about how when that emergency passes people, understandably, want to get back to their daily priorities,” Fink said. “It would really make sense to learn as much as we can, and to capitalize on those investments, because we will almost certainly have other pandemics in the future.”

Entropy, in physics, is essentially a measure of the amount of disorder in a physical system — this means that if a system has a low number of rearrangements, it has low entropy, and if it has a high number of rearrangements, it has high entropy. Brian Greene, one of the foremost theoretical physicists in the world, compared entropy to a messy desk with papers and pens randomly scattered about. 

“When the desk is messy, it has high entropy, high disorder, because there are many rearrangements that you would completely not notice if someone were to do them behind your back,” Greene said. “But if you have a very orderly, very clean desk, … if you go over to that desktop and start to rearrange the ingredients, you do notice.”

Another example of high entropy is how sand on a beach can be configured into almost countless variations. A sand castle, however, has low entropy because it is highly organized and changing any part will make the whole castle look different. 

Greene said that the entropy of one system can affect others, such as with stars, and systems effectively release disorder into their surroundings and keep order within themselves. He said that steam engines of the 17th and 18th centuries burnt “orderly” fuel and released some of that heat into the environment.

“The steam engine must expel the entropy to the environment in order to maintain its orderly form. How does it expel that entropy?” Greene said. “It emits heat to the surroundings, allowing it to maintain its order. While the environment soaks up the disorder, it soaks up in toxic waste.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 10, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Greene delivered a lecture titled “Mind, Matter and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,” opening Week Seven of the Chautauqua Lecture Series, themed “The Science of Us.” Greene discussed how the universe was created through both a process toward greater order and complex structures such as living creatures, as well as progressing to more disorderly systems.

Greene also discussed evolution. He said some scientists tend to view evolution and entropy as “embattled characters fighting it out for dominance.” Evolution is viewed as building evermore complex structures, while entropy is seen as causing more and more disorder. 

“But that is too simplistic a description,” Greene said. “There’s a lot of truth to it, but it’s not the full story.”

While many people associate evolution with living organisms and parents passing down their genes, evolution occurs even down to the level of an atom.

“Over time, interesting, complex, molecular configurations can naturally emerge. No guiding intelligence necessary, just the laws of physics acting themselves out on the ingredients,” Greene said. “The ingredients have this capacity to make copies of themselves and every replication process has some degree of imperfection.”

These imperfections, or modifications to the molecules, Greene said, eventually created systems better suited to their environment.

“Over time,” Greene said, “we get the kinds of molecules able to carry out processes that look like they require some kind of guiding intelligence.”

Greene then talked about the fate of different astrological bodies, such as the sun and black holes. He said in 5 billion years, the sun will use up all of its fuel in its core, imploding inward and rising in temperature. Greene said the sun’s “hydrogen will burn with such intensity that it will force the sun to swell outwards” and become 150-200 times its size, swallowing up the planets Mercury and Venus. 

Black holes, which are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that anything that falls in cannot escape, were thought to be stable and orderly for a long time, he said, as scientists thought black holes could only get bigger. Greene said physicist Stephen Hawking showed in the 1970s that light, which is a form of energy, “streams outward from the edge of a black hole. It’s sort of like burning a piece of charcoal.”

“When you take energy away from the black hole itself, it shrinks. It gets smaller and smaller. We do not yet know what happens at the very end of a black hole when it shrinks all the way down to nothingness,” Greene said. “All that will be left in the cosmos are these particles … wafting through the darkness.”

When some people hear Greene talking about how the universe and its origins can be broken down into equations which have “no evidence of anything like meaning or value or purpose,” they often think he is unfairly criticizing everything they hold dear. 

Greene said he is doing the opposite. “Against all odds,” he said, “we are so spectacularly ordered.”

“We can experience wondering. I’m thinking about everything from building the pyramids to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to the Mona Lisa to King Lear to quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity,” Greene said. “The very fact that collections of particles can do all that fills me with a deep sense of gratitude that really verges upon reverence.”

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt. Ewalt asked Greene what he thought about the concept of a multiverse. 

He said the idea of a multiverse is worthwhile in “our metaphorical toolkit,” something for people to turn to if scientists cannot find any other answers. Greene gave the example of scientists being able to measure the amount of dark energy in space, but unable to explain why that amount exists. Some people say that the value of dark energy changes from universe to universe. 

“The idea that we are one universe of many is highly speculative,” Greene said. “By no means do we have any evidence for it, but it is an idea that’s worthwhile to have at our disposal.”

Ewalt then asked about the emerging narrative in society of distrust in scientists and the need for teaching science, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I don’t sense the mistrust for science surrounding COVID-19. As I sense the growing distrust of the way our leaders have responded to the scientific insights surrounding COVID-19, we see a dance playing out in the world in real time that juxtaposes economic viability with personal safety,” Greene said. 

Every challenge people face has science at its core, and scientists need to play a bigger role in government. 

“If you don’t have leaders that really understand and respect the science, we are going to make wrong decisions left and right going forward,” Greene said. “This is one test case, and it’s a vital one, but it’s a much larger issue of the role that scientific insight will play in the decision-making process going forward.”

Children will routinely meet the expectations set by adults and nothing further, said Carey Wright, state superintendent of education for Mississippi — and the expectations in Mississippi have been low for decades. 

“Mississippi’s reputation and public education has been linked to its overall reputation,” Wright said, “bringing in mind issues such as segregation, poverty, and some of the lowest-performing indicators in both health and education.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 7, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Wright delivered a lecture titled “What Has Worked in Reforming Mississippi’s Education System.” She talked about how Mississippi’s education system was routinely ranked as one of the worst in the United States, and how better equipping students and teachers has given the state some of the most momentum in the nation around education.

Wright started her career as a teacher, then an elementary school principal before taking on leadership roles at district and state levels. She has worked in suburban and urban districts, and with students and families across all socio-economic statuses.

“Throughout my career, my guiding principle as an educator has been one, firm belief that all children can learn and succeed,” Wright said.

When Wright arrived in Mississippi in 2013, Quality Counts, an annual analysis of American education systems by Education Week, ranked the state’s education system 50th in the nation, and its high school graduation rate was 75 percent. Currently, Mississippi’s graduation rate is 85 percent, an all-time high for the state, and has improved in K-12 achievement, students’ chances for success, and equity of education.

Wright said that Mississippi is no longer at the bottom and the state has a lot of momentum going into the future. Despite these achievements, Wright said that there are still skeptics within the state.

“I think the story has been told for so long about us always being at the bottom, that they don’t really understand what our schools and our teachers have achieved in the recent years,” Wright said. 

Mississippi adopted a variety of policies to change their education system, such as the Common Core State Standards in 2010. Wright said that one of Mississippi’s previous standards was that kindergarteners were only expected to count to 10; now their new standard is children counting to 100.

“We desperately needed higher academic standards. So we adopted those standards and they gave us the foundation to raise the bar for children in Mississippi,” Wright said. “We have since reviewed, revised our standards, and we have even renamed them.”

These higher standards for students required teachers to be able to teach at a higher level with new methods, and Wright said Mississippi passed legislation to help students and educators, including the Early Learning Collaborative Act the Literacy Based Promotion Act.

In 2013, The Early Learning Collaborative Act gave pre-kindergarten classes public money for the first time in Mississippi history, creating 1,500 programs, which Wright said has since doubled, in the most underserved areas of the state. She also said each year educators press Mississippi legislators to make kindergarten mandatory.

“So many children start behind their peers when they enter school. By age 3, children coming from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than their counterparts in affluent families,” Wright said. “That is a significant difference, and this difference has been linked to deficiencies in third-grade reading.”

The Literacy Based Promotion Act focused on reading from pre-K through third grade, requiring that students pass a reading test to be promoted to fourth grade, as well as better training for teachers. 

“When we started this, the Department of Education here in Mississippi didn’t have an Office for Literacy and didn’t have an Office for Early Childhood,” Wright said. “That is something that we have right now.”

Wright said the most important decision a principal makes is who they hire as teachers, because a teacher’s effectiveness is the most important factor for students’ success. She said that children that spend four to five years with highly effective teachers can have the potential to “totally eradicate (poverty’s effect) on student achievement.” This importance of teachers is part of the reason why Wright has focused on the development of educators and shifted the mindset of the Department of Education in Mississippi from trying to make schools and districts comply with their orders, to providing support and resources. 

Once the resources in place and the door to success in education is opened, Wright said students naturally walk though.

“Mississippi students are changing this culture of low expectations,” Wright said. “I am an eternal, eternal optimist. I believe so deeply in the capacity of all children to learn and grow. We all must believe this is possible. We’ve got to believe that the impossible is possible.”

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Shannon Rozner, chief of staff and vice president of strategic initiatives for Chautauqua Institution. Rozner asked if Wright always wanted to be an educator. 

Wright said she always had a passion for teaching, and she gained even more motivation when she first taught in Maryland in the 1970s.

“Watching … fifth graders and sixth graders that were reading at a first- and second-grade level, it just broke my heart.” Wright said, “It was from that moment that I thought, ‘Regardless of who comes through that door and regardless of where they are, (we need) to make sure that they leave in a much better place than they arrived.’”

Rozner then asked about generational shifts, especially with students learning virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic and not interacting in person. 

Wright said that part of Mississippi’s digital plan for school is expanding tele-health and tele-therapy, or health care that does not have to be in person. She also said that they are working on ensuring that more people have access to pediatricians and mental-health therapists.

“This is a community. It’s got to come together and we can’t ignore the fact that children are struggling, but so are parents, so are teachers,” Wright said.

After working in the Department of Education in President George H.W. Bush’s administration, Diane Ravitch joined several conservative think tanks and advocated for school choice and charter schools. However, in 2006, she said, she became very skeptical of her own views. 

“I began writing and speaking against the things that I had believed in for many years. I basically said, ‘I’ve been wrong for a number of years, and I want to set the record straight,’” Ravitch said. “As the tests are mostly a reflection of family background, you could look at any test results you want. … They all show the richest kids at the top and the poorest kids at the bottom.” 

Ravitch is a research professor of education at New York University and the president of Network for Public Education. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Ravitch held a conversation with Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt, titled “The History of Education and Where It’s Going.” Ravitch discussed the privatization of education in the United States, the failings of charter schools and action that needs to be taken to help students, teachers and communities, especially during the age of COVID-19.

Ravitch said that the push for privatization first came from Republicans, but President Bill Clinton was one of the first Democratic politicians to support charter schools, creating a federal program in 1994 that used $5 million to make charter startups. 

“It was unusual for Democrats to support charter schools at that time, because it meant handing money over to private entrepreneurs,” Ravitch said. “What the private entrepreneurs have done with the charter money since then is create a charter sector, which enrolls 6% of American schoolchildren, and there are about 6,000 charter schools overall.”

Ravitch said these 6,000 charter schools attract immense public attention because they are presented as “miracle cures.” Over the past 20 years, she said, people have learned that these schools are very unstable, as they are part of the free market.

“The free market has a lot of casualties. If you look at whether it’s shoe stores or restaurants, they come and go,” Ravitch said. “Some of them persist, some of them don’t. The same is true of charter schools.”

She said there are corporate chains of charter schools, including non-profits and for-profits. 

“When they are for-profit, they obviously make money. When they’re non-profit, instead of making money, they pay huge salaries,” Ravitch said. “In some cases, the CEO may be earning a million dollars a year, which in public education is ridiculous.”

Ravitch said that in American legislation, charter schools are called public charter schools, but are “actually not public schools; they’re privately managed schools that receive public money. You might call them contract schools.”

President George W. Bush became a major supporter of charter schools, and Ravitch said while many people thought President Barack Obama would be opposed, his administration built on education programs created during the Bush administration.

During the economic crisis in 2008, the Obama administration sent out $100 billion in aid to help the education system, but Ravitch said Congress gave around $5 billion of that aid to Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan — a charter school supporter — to distribute.

Duncan helped create the “Race to the Top” program, and told states that to receive part of that $5 billion, they would have to agree to create more charter schools, adopt the Common Core Standards and evaluate teachers on the scores of their students, as well as close schools that produced very low scores. 

“All these were really bad ideas because there was no evidence behind any of them. None. The Common Core had never been tried … so no one knew whether it would make a difference or not. Ten years later we can say it made no difference,” Ravitch said. “Opening more charter schools didn’t solve any problems because the charter schools we already had were not solving any problems.”

Ravitch said evaluating teachers based on the test scores of their students was demoralizing for the teachers. Individual teachers may teach students with disabilities who make very small progress — progress that Ravitch said should be celebrated — while others may have classes of gifted students. 

Almost half of all charter schools ever created have closed, and Ravitch said some collect money from the federal government and never open. 

“So it’s a very volatile sector. Arnie Duncan’s administration was really a series of bad policies, and his emphasis on charter schools and his tremendous support for them paved the way for Betsy DeVos,” Ravitch said. “Then Trump was elected, and he brought in Betsy DeVos who had no background in education, other than as an opponent of public schools.”

Ewalt asked Ravitch about why she wrote her recent book Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.

Ravitch said she first laid out steps that society should be taking in terms of public education, such as opposing the closures of schools. She wrote about a civil rights leader named Jeetu Brown, who organized a dozen people to fight the closure of the last open-enrollment high school in the south side of Chicago.

“I wanted to tell their stories and many more about parents, teachers, and students who said, ‘No,’ and who fought back,” Ravitch said. “So that’s the story of slaying Goliath, and then the other half of the story is who is Goliath.”

Ravitch said that the “Goliath” in terms of public education and charter schools are the very few, wealthy individuals who are supporting the privatization of education — “a very small number of people are imposing privatization against the wishes of communities, who are losing their right to choose their school, for the right to have a say in what happens to their community, and who are being turned from citizens into consumers. None of which helps education. None of which helps kids.”

Ravitch said if the leaders of the movement were to hold a convention and not invite anyone who was paid by them, there would be no one there.

“This is a movement that is not fueled by passion, or by volunteers,” she said. “It’s fueled by money, and only by money.”

Ewalt then asked Ravitch to discuss the weakness in the U.S. education system exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ravitch said the pandemic has exposed inequities in schools, such as resources in affluent suburbs versus resources in cities. She said districts with many resources are able to take greater care of the health of their students and staff, with some schools able to cover each student desk with plastic.

“In the impoverished urban districts, even when there’s a lot of money being spent, it’s still not enough for the incredible needs of kids who are exposed every day to trauma, and to hunger and to lack of medical care,” Ravitch said.

The pandemic also showed disparities in access to the internet, and each district has had to find funding to provide some sort of access to their students. 

“This is harder where students don’t have a computer at home,” Ravitch said. “I’ve heard about students who are getting their online lessons on the one cell phone that their family has.”

While visiting 250 schools during his 1998 gubernatorial campaign, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, watched a student practicing for the HSCT test, a test that students needed to pass to graduate high school. Bush said the student could not answer the question, “If a baseball game starts at 3 p.m. and ends at 4:30 p.m., how long was the game?”

“Having all of these kinds of personal stories as a candidate really supercharged me as governor to make sure that I did everything I could to change the system so that (students), particularly the lower-performing kids, would have a fighting chance,” Bush said. “I think (education) is the great equalizer. Quality education will allow for many different possibilities for a young person as they start their life. The opposite is true if they don’t have the quality education.”

As well as being the governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, Bush was a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and is founder, president and chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Excellence in Education. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Bush joined in conversation with Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill on “Fostering Bold and Transformational Education Reform.” Bush discussed the actions he took to transform the public education system in Florida, what school systems and educators need to focus on today and how the pandemic has impacted the education sector. 

Hill asked Bush to outline the education overhaul he conducted as governor of Florida, and why he did it.

Bush said when he took office, Florida ranked last in the country in high school graduation rates. 

When he was running for office, one of his plans involved more accountability in education, such as if a school was rated an “F,” with the highest rank being “A,” two times in four years, then every child had the option of attending a private school or a better-performing public school. Bush said that plan also held back students at the end of third grade if they were functionally illiterate. 

“If you’re telling people you have these high expectations for every kid, then you have to (have) the resources to be able to back it up,” Bush said. “A lot of times, people advocate reforms that don’t have the resources to actually make the reforms work.”

Bush said reading coaches were hired at every school and teachers were better trained to teach reading. He said Florida went from the bottom of the 50 states, to sixth, in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math levels. 

“The kids that led the way were low-income kids, Hispanic kids, African-American kids, kids with learning disabilities, because we measured and we had accountability around them and the system,” Bush said. “The entire system was really organized to make sure that they rose up.” 

Hill asked Bush about over-testing students, and how to measure their skills while not simply teaching them how to get high scores on tests. 

“Great teachers don’t teach to the test; they teach to the expectations that are set by educators,” Bush said. 

Bush believes that testing as a measurement is important, and also that there is too much testing. He believes that testing should be done at the end of the semester, instead of during the middle, as in some schools. These tests should diagnose exactly where the student stands, and Bush said this information should be given to their parents, their teacher, as well as their teacher the following year. 

Hill asked Bush how his plans on school choice played out in Florida — plans which many viewed as dismantling traditional public schools.

Bush helped set up the first charter school in Florida, Liberty City Charter School, which first taught 90 Black students whose parents chose to send their children there. These parents were directly involved with the school and, Bush said, helped shape how the school was governed. 

“That, to me, is what public education ought to be about. It ought to be driven by parents empowered with the decisions,” Bush said. “The school was successful. And it was a great learning experience.”

Bush said systems and processes are not what is important.

“I’ve never felt like the system is what needs to be protected,” Bush said. “It’s how do we make sure … we customize the learning experience where (children) are the ones that are front and center.”

Hill asked Bush about the weaknesses the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed in the educational system.

Bush said that the pandemic has made equity issues even more prominent. He gave an example: a parent who cannot work from home, with a child who cannot go to school. 

“That creates massive strains, not just on the education system but on family life, and we’re seeing it play out,” he said. “We’re seeing increases in drug use and foster care. Child abuse is up. Domestic violence is up. Alcoholism is up. These societal stresses have a direct impact, particularly on lower-income families and lower-income students.”

Bush also said that well-funded school systems have and had major issues with the pandemic; technical issues can interrupt or block virtual delivery, and students may only be able to attend remotely three times a week rather than six hours a day. 

“I have a lot of respect for people making these decisions all across the country, because there is no easy way to do this,” Bush said. “In this hyper-politicized environment, when you make a decision, someone’s going to be mad. Then when it doesn’t work exactly right, because there’s a lot of unknowns on this, you’re going to be criticized.”

Hill then asked Bush if systemic racism is an issue in the American education system specifically, and if it is, what action can be taken.

Bush talked about how KIPP Academy, one of the top-performing charter school organizations in the U.S., decided to stop using their motto “Work hard. Be nice.,” after George Floyd’s murder on May 25. 

“They had a big debate amongst their community … the families and the teachers, and they eliminated that, because the point was that systemic racism is so pervasive that working hard and being nice isn’t enough,” Bush said. “But they didn’t replace it with something, either.”

Bush thinks that there is systemic racism in education. One example he gave is that in Miami school districts, teachers who are higher paid — typically those who have been teaching in the area longer — can choose where they work. These teachers may move to schools that have students that are “more capable of taking on higher-order work.” 

“These are systemic elements of our system that end up disproportionately hurting lower-income kids that are disproportionately students of color,” he said. “So I do think that there’s systemic racism from that perspective.”

Bush said the best teachers should be teaching in the most-challenged schools, and they should be paid higher for working at these schools. 

“I’m not sure it’s inherently racist, that it’s designed to be racist, but the net effect is the same; and fixing it is important, rather than having the debate about what is systemic,” Bush said.

Hill’s final question was: If education were to be at the center of the next presidential debate, what question Bush would ask the candidates. 

“I would say, ‘Why aren’t you fixing the digital divide?’” Bush said. “‘Why don’t you make digital infrastructure the highest priority, so that this incredibly generous and prosperous country gives everybody a chance to be successful, making sure that everybody, every kid irrespective of the level of income, has a device that allows him to learn at home?’”

“When you have a new generation, every child is a fountain of possibilities. They are a miracle of talent and potential,” said Sir Ken Robinson, professor emeritus at University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. “What becomes of that has everything to do with opportunity, with how they’re raised, and especially if they’re educated.”

Robinson said humans, like other animals, thrive under certain conditions. He said that the same is true in education, with many people losing their passion for learning if they’re not in the right conditions.

“Education is meant to be the system that encourages and cultivates learning, but a lot of children have a bad time with it,” Robinson said. “Schools in particular often see that appetite for learning beginning to fade.”

One innate characteristic of learning is endless creativity, which Robinson said comes with an endless curiosity.

“We’re not seeing the world as it is,” Robinson said. “We’re seeing it through frameworks of ideas or belief systems, according to the cultures that we grew up in.”

Humans collaborate on almost everything, but Robinson said that most education systems prioritize compliance and conformity, rather than creativity and collaboration. 

“Children are being educated in groups, but not as groups. They’re being judged against each other,” Robinson said. “They’re competing for the next level. They’re competing for places, beyond formal education, either in universities, or in some form of post-tertiary education.” 

Robinson is a world-renowned education expert and the most-watched speaker in TED Talk history; he is also the author of numerous books, including Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education and You, Your Child, and School: Navigate Your Way to the Best Education. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Robinson presented his pre-recorded lecture titled “The State of the American Education System,” originally scheduled for Aug. 3 but postponed due to a family emergency, and aired without a live Q-and-A. He focused on the current qualities of American education, how the system of public education came to be and what education needs to look like to appeal and include a diverse range of mindsets. 

Many people believe that children are blank slates, ready to pick up traits and talents from their parents and community.

“If you’ve got children, (you know) that couldn’t be any further from the truth. Children are born fully loaded. Every one of them has a unique set of talents and possibilities — whether they discover them is a different matter,” Robinson said. “Human resources are very much like natural resources; that’s to say, they are very diverse.”

These talents are often buried beneath the surface, but Robinson said when people discover their natural talents, life takes on a different course. He also said that everyone lives with talents they have never found, and many people leave school prematurely because they believe they do not have any special talents.

“The current system is not based on diversity. It’s looking for a certain sort of talent, mainly academic ability,” Robinson said. “The consequence is that other sorts of talent are marginalized.”

He said that arts and physical education are viewed as recreational activities, which are often abandoned when the student becomes busier with areas that the education system values more. 

Robinson said many talents and skills cannot be measured and taught through conventional classroom means. His granddaughter, for example, is learning and discovering how to speak, and when teaching a child how to speak, people do not sit them down and explain nouns and verbs to them. 

“Honestly, nobody gets it,” Robinson said. “That’s embedded in the language and we just pick it up.”

Learning is also about developing young people, as well as nurturing their discovery. One example Robinson gave was teaching students calculus. 

“If you want to learn those things, it’s much better if you have experts, as it is in most fields, who can help you do that,” he said.

Robinson said education depends on keeping students curious and recognizing their talents, as well as keeping the learning process a social and collaborative experience. Where the current education system fails is focusing on certain areas of academic work, which Robinson said is “only a partial account of our capabilities.”

He said people “unconsciously divide the world into two types of children: the academic and the non-academic, or the able, and the less able.” 

“You do well, you can go on and be judged (as) the great success of the education system. If you don’t, you’re quite likely exposed to remedial programs to try and get you up to par,” Robinson said. “And if you don’t make it through those, you probably leave the system altogether, or you’re judged to be the failure.”

Robinson said one of the tragedies of American education is that each year huge numbers of young people leave school prematurely.

“I really dislike the term ‘dropout,’ because it implies that the children have failed the system. I think it’s much more accurate to say that the system failed them. Most children want to learn,” Robinson said. “It’s amazing how many successful creative people (have been) … written off in the school system.”

Robinson said the mass system of public education in the U.S. was created to meet demands, such as the need for higher-skilled workers during the Industrial Revolution, as opposed to the largely agrarian society of the past. The IQ test, which was first introduced during this era, was used in higher education, the military and mandated for immigrants. 

“It’s like coming into America, put in a Lamborghini and being given a driving test, and all you’ve ever had before is a horse and cart,” Robinson said. “There are skills and conventions here that you can’t just improvise.”

A more chilling use of the IQ test was in the military, Robinson said, where a person’s score often determined whether they lived or died. A high score meant they could be an officer, a lower score meant they were placed in the infantry.

“And if you’ve got below that level, the rather chilling memo, or category in the report, was of ‘low-military value,’” Robinson said. “We know what happened to people who were discounted in that sort of way.”

Along with conformity and compliance, Robinson said the current system of public education prioritizes linearity, meaning that schools prepare students for certain experiences in the future. An example of this is how many private schools see their students’ rate of acceptance into Ivy League schools as the biggest marker of success. 

“Most people have been increasingly prepared for university, and the consequences of this is an obsession that we start to weed the sheep and the goats,” Robinson said. “Children are groomed for university.”

Robinson said the public education system needs to shift from standardization and conformity to personalization, while also customizing education to the present times and circumstances. 

“Now, that’s not about lowering standards,” Robinson said. “On the contrary, we’ll see them rise.”

He said the public education system has three big elements that need to be changed: the amount of standardized testing, the primary focus on math, science and reading, and the neglect systems often show toward teachers. 

“The future of education is teaching, and the quality of it. It’s the teacher who inspires children. It’s the teacher who brings the expertise in the school,” Robinson said. “It’s the teacher who sees the potential, identifies the problems of learning, what’s happening in the local environment, and can devise strategies to deal with it on their own, but as part of the school’s job as well.”

Robinson said throughout the world, it has been demonstrated that improving education depends on investing in vibrant, well-qualified teachers. 

“Teachers have been seen as sort of delivery agents. It’s been based on the assumption that we need to make education teacher-proof, and you simply can’t,” Robinson said. “It’s like trying to make hospitals doctor-proof. It only works if the relationship is right.”

What Robinson laid out is not a theory; there are many examples of systems schools and teachers implementing more customized, collaborative and successful systems for their students. 

“(People say) that the birth of every child is a miracle. It’s true. Life is a miracle,” Robinson said. “And how can we come here, how we develop, is miraculous.”

Studying history can show people what to do now, and Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving woman in Congressional history, said that that work, “in terms of women’s history, … is often invisible, overworked, undervalued, and, quite frankly, (contains) too many hidden figures.”

Mikulski wants to “own the whole narrative,” in the women’s suffrage movement, including mistakes made in that movement.

“It was grassroots organizing at its very best … but at the same time it was (exclusionary),” Mikulski said. “There were … strains of racism and xenophobia that ran through it.”

In order for a democracy to work, she said people have to actively participate.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” Mikulski said. “We have to continue to work at keeping democracy going and expanding democracy in our own communities and beyond.”

Mikulski is a former U.S. Senator from Maryland, and is the longest-serving woman in Congressional history, a lifelong public servant, and is currently the Homewood Professor of Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, July 31, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Mikulski finished the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Five theme of “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond” in conversation with Institution President Michael E. Hill on “How to Use This Anniversary to ‘Remember, Reflect and Recommit.’” Mikulski discussed the women’s suffrage movement, her time in the Senate and the support she received from female and male legislators.

Growing up in Baltimore, Mikulski did not think she could make a career in politics. She began her career as a social worker, but Mikulski realized the people she wanted to help needed more resources, and she needed to become an advocate for them.

“When you want to be an advocate, it takes you to politics,” Mikulski said. “Then politics took me to the great battles in the 1960s around voter registration and voting rights itself.” 

Then in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, former U.S. Attorney General, she wanted to take a break from public work and earn a doctorate. Along the way, she became aware of a plan in Baltimore to build a highway through communities of European immigrants, such as families from Poland and Italy, and also Black communities. Mikulski decided to run for Baltimore City Council.

“I got into the fight. I knocked on doors. Doors were slammed. I decided to open doors, … faced ridicule, faced obstacles, but, guess what? The people were on my side,” Mikulski said. “That’s my message today: That … politics is not a top-down thing. It is bottom-up.”

Hill asked what role men play in advocating for women’s rights.

Mikulski said that men have always been a part of the women’s advocacy movement. She said that Frederick Douglass worked with Susan B. Anthony, though they did not agree on everything, such as issues of race and inclusion. John Lewis, she said, was one of the biggest advocates for women’s rights when he was in office from 1987 to his death this month.

When Mikulski first came to Congress, former Sen. Paul Sarbanes (MD-D) helped her gain positions on certain committees. During this time, she and former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum (KA-R) were the only women in the Senate, and she said men worked with her on legislation on the economic empowerment of women.

Hill asked what Mikulski’s prescription for society is now, to ensure women do not have to be exceptionally talented and qualified compared to their male counterparts in order to get a fair chance in elections.

She said that women continue to work to claim their power in society.

“We claim that power, and ensure that it’s not taken away directly through the law or indirectly through patterns, policies and practices,” Mikulski said.

Many women run for political office because, Mikulski said, of their experience working at volunteer organizations, trying the improve that group and having their opinions dismissed. Similar to Mikulski, her friend, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), never thought of running for office, but when Murray was lobbying for better childcare legislation, a state senator told her she was “just a mom in tennis shoes.”

“She’s been running ever since,” Mikulski said. “As she runs, she builds up her entire community.”

Mikulski quoted Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair.” Mikulski recommended that everyone look at educational institutions, such as public schools and public libraries in their communities, and to get involved.

“It’ll take you into working on policies,” Mikulski said. “I believe it’ll take you into lacing up those tennis shoes, squaring your shoulders, putting your lipstick on and getting out there.”

Hill then asked how society’s faith in public institutions could be restored.

Mikulski said that this lack of trust can be seen in different times in history; people used to say in the ‘60s, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” She said people need to question what information sources they trust, and ask if the source is educational or “propaganda in a steady, daily, corrosive effect.”

She said people have been questioning the work of scientists, amidst the pandemic and climate change. Because science can be validated through peer review and factual numbers, Mikulski said that it is a good starting point for rebuilding trust.

“Let’s claim our respect for science, our respect for scientists, our respect for scientific information,” Mikulski said. “If we start with something that can be validated, we can then move on to other areas.”

Hill asked Mikulski about former Vice President Joe Biden’s commitment to have a female running mate in his presidential bid, and what qualities Biden should be looking for in his vice presidential pick. 

When Geraldine Ferraro became the first female running mate in U.S. history, she was one of Mikulski’s best friends in Congress.

“We thought we had broken a barrier. But again, it’s taken over 30 years to come back to this point,” Mikulski said.

She said she knows Biden will make the “right decision” because of the way he uses his core principles, and said that young Americans need inspiration. Mikulski said the passion that came from Lewis’ death last week was partly due to a need of society for inspirational leaders such as him.

“It was not only the recognition of the incredible life … but it was the hunger to have a champion, to have a champion that you could trust, and a champion that wanted to help everybody as they worked,” Mikulski said.

The national fight for equal rights began more than a century ago, the charge led by women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and kept afloat by individual women and men across the country who believed in equality for all. 

Carol Jenkins’ fight for equal rights began before she was even born; her grandfather, a small farmer in rural Alabama with 16 children, brought each and every one of them into the world with a belief that women are equal to men. 

His ideas, so radical at the time that he was written about in a local newspaper for sending his nine daughters to college while keeping his six sons home to run the farm, shaped the mindset that Jenkins carries with her each day. 

Jenkins said her grandfather’s unique way of thinking produced “a small army of doctors, lawyers and businesswomen, an impressive crop for a small piece of land owned by an equality-believing farmer.” 

It was her feminist grandfather who planted the revolutionary seed, and it was her own passion that caused it to grow. 

“I am a believer in equality; I do the equality work; I do it every single day, and I will do it every single day until there is an Equal Rights Amendment,” Jenkins said. “We are closer than we have ever been before.” 

Jenkins, co-president and CEO of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality presented her lecture “On the Work Toward Passage and Enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment” in keeping with the Week Five Chautauqua Lecture Series theme of “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, July 30, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Platform.

According to a recent ERA Coalition survey, over 90% of all Americans are in favor of the passage of the ERA. Women make up the majority of the American population, yet are disproportionately affected by gender bias and prejudice.

“Women are most of the poor in our country, the un- or under-employed or the underpaid,” Jenkins said. “Women are subjected to domestic and sexual insult, assault or aggression, and are lacking in protections and rights.”

Jenkins spoke about the approaching 20th anniversary of the deaths of Jessica Lenahan’s three daughters, who were abducted and killed by Lenahan’s estranged husband after police refused to enforce an order of protection. The case is important to Jenkins because, when Lenahan filed a lawsuit against the police department on the basis of gender discrimination, the Supreme Court ruled that she had no due process right to enforcement of her restraining order. Surpreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the police department was only required to make arrests for protective order violations at their discretion, prompting the ACLU to file a suit on behalf of Lenahan alleging gender discrimination.

Sexual discrimination often goes hand-in-hand with racial discrimination, or vice-versa, and women of color are frequently faced with the highest instances of prejudice and injustice, which Jenkins believes has only gotten worse in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The current pandemic has exposed for all to see what inequality breeds, and that it can mean the difference between life and death,” she said.

The surge of protests and activism indicates to Jenkins that the movement toward justice and equality is growing and gaining traction. 

“Given the recent throngs in the streets protesting the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as charges of racism and sexism inherent in our society, it is not surprising that many of us believe that systemic change, real change, is required in America,” Jenkins said. “To that point, there is nothing more systemic than the core legal document that dictates our rights and protections than the Constitution.”

The authors of the Constitution — the “Framers” — were wealthy white men, most of whom were slave owners. As they drew up the Constitution, the rights and protections in the document were only afforded to property-owning white men. Others — namely, women and enslaved people — were excluded.

However, the Framers, anticipating growth and transformation of the young country in years to come, included a clause which created an amendment process for the Constitution should there be a need to adjust the governing document moving forward. 

As of the year 2020, the Constitution has been amended 27 times, notably granting rights and citizenship to African-Americans and allowing women the right to vote. 

However, there is still no clause prohibiting discrimination based on sex; the Equal Rights Amendment is meant to eradicate injustice based on gender in what would be the 28th amendment to the Constitution. 

As the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 1920 19th Amendment approaches, so too does the centennial anniversary of the proposal of the Equal Rights Amendment, introduced by suffragette Alice Paul in 1923. The amendment, if ratified, would contain an explicit statement of gender equality and prohibit discrimination based on sex. 

The process for amending the Constitution is not a simple one — it requires a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress in favor of the bill, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the 50 states. In 1972, in a groundbreaking moment, two thirds of Congress voted to pass the ERA with an added provision of a seven-year time limit for it to be ratified by the required 38 states. 

Seven years passed, and only 35 states had ratified the amendment. Congress granted three more years to the time limit but still, three states were needed to finalize the process. 

“The movement for the ERA seemed to fall silent,” Jenkins said. “But there were still people working.”

Then, Jenkins said, the 2016 election sent shockwaves of indignation through the country which renewed both passion and interest in the ERA. 

“There were colossal worldwide women’s marches, the heartbreaking impact of the #MeToo movement; something was in the air,” Jenkins said. “It was the voices of women that we heard then, and soon on their lips were the letters ERA, long fallen into disrespect and forgotten by most of the country. In recent history, the ERA became alive again as a valid movement and perhaps as the thing to solve the problem of this persistent inequality of women in this country.”

In response to the swelling movement, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) created the ERA Coalition, which provided a forum for groups fighting for the ERA to work together, now representing millions of women and girls across the country and hundreds of organizations. 

Soon after its formation, the ERA Coalition won a great victory — Nevada had become the 36th state to ratify the amendment. A year later in 2018, Illinois voted to ratify the ERA, leaving only one more empty slot. 

On Jan. 27, 2020, Virginia became the 38th and final state to ratify the amendment.

“What an exhilarating moment, sitting in the chamber with women who had worked their entire lives for this, watching the mostly women of color legislators who carried that bill see it pass,” Jenkins said. “It was an incredible breakthrough for everyone doing the equality work.”

Now all they needed was an archival ratification — for the bill to be signed by the Archivist of the United States, the position which oversees the National Archives and Records Administration.

The Department of Justice ordered the bill not to be signed on the grounds that the time limit had expired, prompting three states, 52 women’s and social justice organizations and over 90 businesses to file a lawsuit compelling the archivist to sign the ERA, a fight which is still ongoing. 

Though obstacles still remain in place, Jenkins finds great inspiration in the progress toward equality made thus far, especially when it comes to her 10-year-old granddaughter — who has lobbied for the bill with Jenkins since the age of 7. 

Her granddaughter was present when Jenkins gave a speech to the night before the vote in the Virginia House of Representatives for ratification; Jenkins wanted to show her the impact of the movement. 

“I wanted her to see what courage, commitment and dedication to equality look like. I wanted her to see your faces and know that tomorrow, you will be casting a vote for her equal future in this country,” Jenkins said. “I want her to see that it was all worth it.”

Jenkins ended her lecture with a question: “How can we continue to look into our daughters and granddaughters faces and tell them that we will do nothing to raise them up in this society that has cast them as second class citizens and kept them there, when a remedy — the 28th Amendment — was at hand?” 

“The Senate and the courts demand equality for the girls and women of this country,” Jenkins concluded.