Widening Circles of Care

The need for "a collective ethic of solidarity and care"

This article was written as part of my NaNoWriMo challenge for the month of November. See more information here. With that in mind, please excuse any errors and quality control issues.

Part I: The Books Are Aligning

Do you ever have that experience where certain serendipitous patterns seem to eerily emerge and repeat themselves in the books, articles, and podcasts that you are reading and listening to?

Right now, for me, it’s the idea of a society of care. For me, this means a society that fosters widespread change from the ground up by engaging in small, meaningful human-centred local actions—in true partnership with the communities involved, meeting them where their needs lie—to ultimately drive national transformation and result in a more interconnected, caring society.

The need to build such a care-based society is the conclusion reached by several books I’ve recently read—diverse books that on the cover have little in common.

Here’s a quick overview:

• Doppelganger by Naomi Klein - a book about online conspiracy theories and political doubling. In the book, Klein points towards the example of Red Vienna—a child-centred, caring society organized and implemented by Democratic socialists amidst the rubble of WW1—as one example of a successful care-based society. She writes:

  Personally, and to no one’s surprise, I think the jury is in on capitalism: it lights up our most uncaring, competitive parts and is failing us on every front that matters. What we need are systems that light up our better selves, the parts of ourselves that want to look outward at a world in crisis and join the work of repair. Systems that make it easier, in ways big and small, for care to win the battle over uncare.

• It’s Not Fair: Why It’s Time for a Grown-Up Conversation About How Adults Treat Children by Eloise Rickman - a book about children’s rights and children’s liberation from an adultist society. I talk more about her conclusions at the end of this article. She writes:

  Relying on systemic change will not get us towards children’s liberation if it is constrained by a fundamentally exploitative economic and political system steeped in adultist beliefs…I no longer believe that the urgent radical change children need will come from within existing systems of power. Instead we need to move towards a collective ethic of solidarity and care.

• A Manifesto for Hope by Steve Chalke - a manifesto by the founder of the Oasis Charitable Trust about community-centred development. He concludes:

  If we are going to build and fund an integrated and holistic system of care for children, young people, and their families—one which is aligned and attuned to the real needs of those it seeks to serve—we have to reimagine society together.

• Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World by Thomas Heatherwick - a book about the soulless architecture of our contemporary cities and how to restore humanity to our built environments. He writes:

  We must wake up the the injustice being done to us. We must insist on being heard. Too many places are being created by people who are not interested enough in how they make the public feel, and seeking only to make profit. Money cannot be the value that dominates all others. We must demand that the construction industry places just as much value on the thoughts and feelings of the thousands of men, women and children who have no choice but to experience their buildings everyday.

• Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart - a political memoir by a former UK politician and diplomat about his time in political office. Stewart similarly proposes local, community-centred change, whether it’s listening to and addressing local concerns in Penrith, UK or Afghanistan and Iraq, he expresses constant frustration with how the UK government often overlooks these issues in favour of high-profile projects and aloof, interventionist approaches. He writes:

  I have not met, in Afghanistan, in even the most remote community, anybody who does not want a say in who governs them. I have never met a villager who does not want a vote.

What makes it even weirder for me is that I picked up all of these books at random on different occasions from Topping & Company Booksellers in Bath. I’ve been challenging myself to read nonfiction books that have nothing to do with my work as an educator, yet everything still seems to connect.

A Hopeful Way Forward

Today, the eeriness continued with a post from Anne Helen Peterson, whose substack thread Culture Study is a must-read. Her post involves an interview with Hahrie Han, author of the book Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church which tells the story of a racial reconciliation program at a Cincinnati church and serves as one example of what transformative small-scale change can look like. Han says in the interview:

Too often, social change solutions are designed by professional technocrats, tested by experts, and funded as “data-driven solutions” by philanthropists. The people who are living with the challenge are not invited to design their own solutions, practice vulnerability, or take emotional and strategic risks. Instead, they are given easy solutions — buying tote bags, donating money, signing petitions — that leave control in the hands of people who design them. Ordinary people — those who need to be the agents of change — are never given the chance to own it. Without that opportunity, their support remains forever fickle.

This is a clear echo of Steve Chalke’s manifesto and many of the other books I listed above. We need to empower adults and children to be agents of change within their own communities.

Peterson finds real hope in Han’s book as a beacon amidst the despair of our current political moment. She writes at the beginning of the article:

I should also say that I am deeply pessimistic about the outcome of this election: if Trump wins, Trump wins, and we have a very good idea of the sort of chaos, fear, and very real harm will unfurl as a result. If Kamala Harris wins, Trump will claim he won, and millions of Americans will believe him. The animus and division — between, ultimately, dueling understandings of truth and reality — feels intractable. And I’m not hopeful about that changing in the short-term.

But I am hopeful about small changes happening in communities working through the messy work of figuring out justice. And I’m heartened by books like Han’s, which refuses to shy away from that messiness — or paint an overly-rosy picture of what this work looks like.

This is also true of all of the books I read above. Despite how overwhelming and out-of-control the world seems, I draw real hope and inspiration from each of them. They each provide a road map for small-scale local change; a journey that we can all embark upon now by starting to organize and transform our own communities first.

If we take the problems of the world as a whole—our oppressive education systems, climate change, the rise of far-right nationalism, our inhumane built environments, our broken political system, global warfare and violence—it can feel crushing. But within our communities, we have real agency and an opportunity to make a difference. The problem is we are too easily distracted by the big picture—by media narratives, tote bags, political division, doomscrolling—and we are missing the opportunities to make a difference on our doorsteps. This doesn’t mean we stop caring about national policy or global climate activism, but we have to begin at home.

I wrote more about this idea in a recent article on Octavia Butler and Dr. Montessori - see here. In the article, I mention adrienne marie brown’s book Emergent Strategy and her belief that small, localized efforts, when aligned with an overarching vision, can catalyze significant long-term change.

Part II: Open Hands, Open Hearts

I have discovered these patterns at just the right time.

After years of being a teacher, which, at its best, is such a grounded, humane job that allows you to see and feel the impact of your work, the majority of my work is suddenly online. I have found this shift really hard. Cultivating a presence on LinkedIn, for example, is exhausting. Trying to maintain working relationships with schools and teachers online is also draining.

Furthermore, I have felt disillusioned about the future of Montessori education in the UK in general. Now that I have a greater sense of all the systemic barriers preventing the progress of our movement, I’m struggling to see a sustainable future for myself as an elementary and adolescent guide. The jobs and funding just aren’t there.

But the books above have helped me see a different path. Rather than striving to be a Montessori influencer or joining the ever-increasing hordes of Montessori consultants and speakers, what would it look like to focus instead on changing the lives of children and young people in my local community?

This last weekend, I participated in a retreat for a local charitable organization I am supporting called The Kind Schools Project. This is a project set up by the parents of a teenage girl in our community who committed suicide last year. Their powerful mission is to transform schools into kinder more caring environments to help prevent further tragedy for young people, starting with the schools in our neighbourhood.

During our retreat, we engaged in some Theatre of the Oppressed-style acting, where we were asked in small groups to embody our goals for the project.

In my group, we discussed a shared value that we didn’t want any schools and teachers we work with to feel that change was being imposed on them. They are overwhelmed as it is, and we need to meet them where they are. One member of our group suggested the mantra “Nothing About Us Without Us” which originated within disability rights circles.

In order to embody this concept, the three of us stood in a semi-circle holding our hearts, and then in unison we joined hands—but, critically, we left an opening for an imagined teacher or child to join us. When we silently demonstrated this to the rest of the group, one adult felt moved to get up and join hands with us—and then the whole group did! It was a very powerful moment, and truly captured the idea that small open-hearted actions cause ripples that can bring more and more people into a movement, creating meaningful change in local people’s lives, and, with enough momentum, can lead to large-scale social change.

Widening Circles of Care

Of all the books listed above, the one most directly relevant to our work as educators and parents is It’s Not Fair: Why It’s Time for a Grown-Up Conversation About How Adults Treat Children by Eloise Rickman. This book is a radical call for children’s liberation that aligns the fight for children’s equality with other social justice movements and puts a name to the structural and systemic discrimination children face: adultism. I found it a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting book that has helped me reconnect with the essence of Dr. Montessori’s philosophy - her rallying cry to “follow the child.” I’ll talk more about this book in a future article, but right now I want to focus on Rickman’s conclusion to the book.

At the end of the book, Rickman cites this line from Rainer Maria Rilke:

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world

For Rickman, these words hold the key to a way out of the oppressive systems that bind children and adults. “We need to widen our circles of care,” she writes. “I see these widening circles as building on the deep love and care we feel for ourselves and our own children, expanding outwards to think about how we can stand in solidarity with all children, including those in future generations to come.” She continues:

“Like a pebble dropped into a pond, these circles ripple out: when we treat ourselves with compassion, it’s easier to treat our own children with care and respect; when we start by treating our own children as “equals, they are more likely to treat others similarly.”

She goes on to list the widening circles of care that ripple out from such an approach:

1. First circle: caring about our own children and ourselves.

2. Second circle: caring about the children in our local communities.

3. Third circle: caring about the children in the country where we live.

4. Fourth circle: caring for all children everywhere.

5. Fifth circle: caring about future children and the planet they inherit.

These are not phases or steps to move through, she says, but each circle reinforces the others.

For Montessorians, we should be reading and learning from children’s rights activists and academics like Rickman, and we should consider - to what extent are we engaged and invested at every level of these circles of care. Read my last article on leading with vision as Montessorians.

My Local Community

To conclude, I’ve recently committed to turning my attention to children’s issues in my community. I’ve been so focused on developing my online presence, that I’ve lost sight of the work I can do here. As well as the Kind Schools Project, I reached out to volunteer at my local secondary school (high school), and I’ve been working more closely with Lumiar Stowford, an alternative school on my doorstep.

And, this Sunday, I’m speaking with a group of local progressive educators at my local coffee shop! It’s terrifying, but I think it’s a really good step forward for me. Here is the poster; if you live locally, come along!