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Introduction to Hallowell’s essay on "Connectedness"
Steven W. Gilbert
 
As I neared home Tuesday night I saw two policeman talking 
with my wife in front of our house.  I learned that someone 
had broken in while we were away during the 
day.  As we searched through the house, it emerged that very 
little had been taken -- mostly small electronic appliances 
and loose change.  But that night my nine-year old daughter 
couldn't get to sleep in her own room, where someone had 
taken a few of her things and made a mess of toys and 
clothes.  She just didn't feel safe.
 
Last night we went to a neighborhood meeting to learn about 
organizing a "Neighborhood Watch" group from some people who 
have already done so nearby.  This meeting was well-attended 
and had been scheduled before our own burglary.  We learned 
how to walk around our neighborhood and spot and report 
"suspicious" people, activities, or conditions.
 
And this morning I continue to read reports of what happened 
in Oklahoma City and how people there are having so much 
trouble regaining their ability to continue their daily lives 
without frequent feelings of fear and mistrust.  I felt that I had 
been given a tiny, bitter taste of what these people must be living 
with.
 
I'm worried about how we can re-build our world to enable 
more people to live their lives under conditions of trust and 
safety -- conditions where each of us can be part of 
meaningful communities, where we can be connected in ways 
that matter.  How can our efforts to make information 
technology more useful in education contribute?
 
Let me offer one short quote and a chapter from a book on 
related matters.
 
Robert D. Putnam in the _Journal of Democracy_, Volume 6, 
Number 1, January, 1995, pages 65-78, says on page 76 of his 
article "Bowling Alone:  America's Declining Social Capital":
 
"What will be the impact, for example, of electronic networks 
on social capital?  My hunch is that meeting in an electronic 
forum is not the equivalent of meeting in a bowling alley -- 
or even in a saloon -- but hard empirical research is needed.  
What about the development of social capital in the 
workplace?  Is it growing in counterpoint to the decline of 
civic engagement, reflecting some social analogue of the 
first law of thermodynamics -- social capital is neither 
created nor destroyed, merely redistributed?  Or do the 
trends described in this essay represent a deadweight loss?"
 
What follows is from the book: _Finding the Heart of the 
Child:  Essays on Children, Families, and Schools_ 
by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. 
and Michael G. Thompson, Ph.D.
 
Edward Hallowell is a psychiatrist who works often with 
children and schools.  I strongly recommend the entire book.
 
To order a copy of this book, please contact:
Association of Independent Schools in New England, Inc.
222 Forbes Road, Suite 105
Braintree, MA  02184
phone: 617/849-3080
 
This chapter reproduction and distribution via AAHESGIT on 
the Internet was authorized in 1995 by Richard Barbieri, Executive 
Director, Association of Independent Schools in New England.
=========================================================
Pages 193-209
 
Connectedness
 
by Edward M. Hallowell
 
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
The best lack all conviction
While the worst are full of passionate intensity.
 
 When William Butler Yeats wrote those lines over a half 
a century ago, he might have been describing the feelings 
that many people have in the 1990s as they look around and 
try to get their bearings.  We live in a time of remarkable 
connectedness on the one hand.  Globally, we are joined by 
fax machines, telephones, computers, supersonic transport, 
and all manner of electronic communication such that we are 
only seconds away from the other side of the planet.  Yet, 
paradoxically, locally, at our home base, in our home town, 
we are in many ways separated, disconnected, even isolated.  
The connections that sustain and uplift, the connections that 
make life buoyant have, for many people, come unplugged.
 
The topic of this essay, human connectedness, is a 
simple idea, rich in its ramifications.  Let me suggest these 
ramifications through image and anecdote by painting a few 
scenes at the onset.
 
I was in the post office the other day in my hometown of 
Cambridge.  It was just before Christmas.  Everyone was 
bustling about under the slate gray skies that so often 
portend snow at that time of year.  There were even a few 
flakes, I think.  A Christmas carol could be heard from a 
Salvation Army street corner band while worried shoppers 
tried to balance Christmas generosity with hard economic 
times.  I hit the P. O. Box about 3:30 and, much to my 
surprise, it was all but empty.  A small miracle that 
wouldn't last but a minute or two.  I handed my packages to 
the elderly postman behind the counter and watched as he 
weighed my bundles.  He didn't say anything except, "First 
class?" I nodded. He weighed. I waited. He stamped, thump, 
thump, on each package.
 
    I flashed back for a moment - how brains can reproduce 
an entire scene from decades ago faster than a fax machine - 
I flashed back to when I was four, holding onto my 
grandmother's ink-blue overcoat as she handed packages across 
the counter at Christmas, and I asked her where we were going 
next.  "Over the river and through the woods," she said, 
taking coins from he purse, "to grandmother's house we go.  
And when we get there you can help me make eggnog and scrape 
nutmeg on top." 
 
    Now, as I took coins from my own pocket the smell of 
nutmeg seemed to emanate from the brown paper packages before 
me, despite the intervening years.
 
"Christmas at home this year?" the man behind the 
counter asked.  "Yes," I said, somewhat astonished that he 
had spoken. "And you?"  "I'll be with my grandchildren," he 
said with a smile.
"Oh, really?" I said, my grandmother still in my mind. 
"That's great!"  "Seven grandchildren," he said.
 
And then, since the place was empty, we stopped and 
talked. I asked about his grandchildren and got a sentence or 
two on each one.  Those extra few minutes we took with each 
other made all the difference as I went on with my various 
errands.
 
A chance moment of connectedness with my past and with a 
man I'd probably not see again.
 
Connectedness sustains us invisibly.  It can be come by 
in unusual ways. In another Christmas season I was 
interviewing a man - let's call him Charlie - who had been 
brought up to a state psychiatric hospital for evaluation 
because he had been found wondering the Boston Public Gardens 
muttering to himself.  He was admitted to the state hospital 
because he had no funds.  In fact he was homeless.
 
He looked older than his actual age of fifty-four.  He'd 
had a hard life and had creases and lines in his face to show 
for it.  But his eyes also crinkled when he smiled and his 
bushy gray and white beard made me think he was jolly inside.  
Diagnosed with manic depressive illness in his twenties, he'd 
been in and out of mental hospitals ever since.  Medication 
controlled his illness pretty well, but when he stopped 
taking it, which he would now and then as if to tempt fate, 
he would fall apart.  Never married, he loved children.  
Unfortunately, although he had seven nieces and nephews, his 
sister did not like him visiting because they were afraid of 
his psychiatric illness.
 
Of the many odd jobs that Charlie had managed to secure 
for himself over the past thirty years, by far his favorite 
was playing Santa Claus.  Every Christmas season, when he was 
not in the hospital, he would find some department store or 
shopping mall that needed a Santa Claus and sign up for the 
job.
 
"They usually have a sleigh or something fancy for me to 
sit in," Charlie explained. "Then the kids line up.  It's 
such a kick. I really get into the role.  When I put on that 
red suit I feel like I actually become Santa Claus.  I 
believe in him.  I am him at those moments.  Now don't think 
I am crazy, Doc.  I know I'm not Santa Claus.  It's just that 
when I dress up I feel like I am.  And when the kids come 
up...it's the closest thing I get to being a dad.  You know, 
they sit on my knee and tell me what they want, and I smile 
and tap my head and tell them I'll do my best to keep it all 
up here and bring them what they want.  I can sit there all 
day long and never get tired of it.  The floor managers are 
always amazed.  "Don't you want your break?" they ask.  
'Naw,' I say, 'Christmas only comes once a year.'  Sounds 
pretty silly, huh?  I mean I hear all kinds of stories.  It 
makes me feel like I'm part of their lives, all over the 
city.  I even describe to them my workshops up on the North 
Pole.  It has all the latest stuff, you know.  Is that crazy, 
Doc?"
 
"No." I said. "I don't think that's crazy at all, 
Charlie.  If you ask me it's pretty goddamn ingenious."  We 
worked together to get him out of the hospital quickly so he 
could go be Santa Claus for another group of children.
 
Imagine what it must have felt like for Charlie, 
unwelcome in the homes of his own family due to an illness he 
couldn't control, finding makeshift connections with children 
by playing Santa Claus. For a certain time, under the lights 
and hubbub of a shopping mall, Charlie would become a special 
person bringing the gift of Christmas to children he wanted 
to be with but didn't know.
 
In another vein, I think of a five-year old girl, whom I 
shall call Sophie, who connected through imagination to the 
world she wanted to find.  She was brought to see me because 
she had no friends, and her parents thought she was 
pathologically shy.  In fact, as it turned out, she had a 
host of friends, friends that emerged as Sophie and I played 
together on my office floor, friends who were created by 
Sophie in her mind and transported through the medium of play 
to the outside world.
 
Over time, her parents told me of their considerable 
troubles. Each of them was maintaining a fast-track career 
with a multitude of social and business obligations that left 
very little time for Sophie.  Additionally, they blew off 
steam, as they put it, by drinking heavily and often having 
riotous arguments that included much yelling and breaking of 
things.  "We're both very high-intensity," Sophie's father 
said.
 
"We don't mean anything by it," her mother added.  "It's 
like something we do.  We always make up."
 
But Sophie was terrified.  So she withdrew.  In her own 
world she found the safe, soothing connections she couldn't 
find in the world her parents gave her.
 
The unifying themes in these anecdotes, and in this 
paper, is the theme connectedness.  My thesis is this: We 
live in a time that conspires to disconnect us, one from 
another, from institutions, from ideas, and from ideals, so 
that the individual is precariously alone.  I would go on to 
contend that the implications of this disconnectedness for 
children are enormous.
 
I think of the two major tasks of childhood as the 
development of competence and the development of 
connectedness, both of which contribute, in different ways, 
to the overarching goal of developing a sense of confidence 
and self-esteem.  If we do not pay close attention to our 
children's developing sustaining connections, connections of 
all sorts, then they will always be at risk of not finding 
satisfaction and meaning in life, no matter how competent 
they may become.
 
What is connectedness?  It is a sense of being a part of 
something larger than oneself.  It is a sense of belonging, 
or a sense of accompaniment.  It is that feeling in your 
bones that you are not alone.  It is a sense that no matter 
how scary things may become, there is a hand for you in the 
dark.  While ambition drives us to achieve, connectedness is 
my word for the force that urges us to ally, to affiliate, to 
enter into mutual relationships, to take strength and to grow 
through cooperative behavior. 
 
One of my adult patients, a highly accomplished and 
successful man of thirty-five, said to me in reference to his 
feeling lonely, "What I really want to do is walk up to 
people and say, 'Will you be my friend?'  But that makes you 
too vulnerable.  It immediately puts you on the bottom of the 
inherent power differential that is in every relationship."
 
My patient lives in disconnection and so can easily feel 
one down.  In order to handle the tension of the power 
differential he so readily perceives, he works harder and 
harder for success, feeling that if he achieves enough he can 
be on top all the time. Having all the power, he will not 
have to put himself in the vulnerable position of asking, 
"Will you be my friend?"
 
"But no matter how good you are," I say, "there will 
always be someone better.  Then what do you do?"
 
"Work harder," he says wryly.
 
"But don't you think it's good to have friends where 
maybe you're helping each other along, on an equal basis?"  I 
ask.
 
"Nice idea," he says. "But it always comes down to who's 
on top."
 
We have always had to deal with the tension between 
individual achievement and the alienating envy it can spawn.  
None of us has everything.  We all find reasons to envy other 
people.  There is no point in trying to moralize or lecture 
oneself out of envy; it arises spontaneously and it is not 
"bad," but rather natural.
 
However, the best antidote to the corrosive force of 
envy is not, as my patient suggests, more achievement, the 
success cure so many seek these days, but rather the best 
antidote is to have meaningful and sustaining connections to 
other people, institutions, or ideals.  These connections act 
as internal supports that pick one up from failure, 
disappointment or rejection.  The connected person can never 
fall very far because there are the life lines of support to 
break the fall.  The disconnected person, on the other hand, 
dangles precariously held in place by the strength of his own 
arm.
 
In developing this idea of connectedness I would like to 
look at six different kinds of connectedness and consider a 
few aspects of each.  They include:
 
  1. Familial connectedness
 
  2. Historical connectedness
 
  3. Social connectedness
 
  4. Institutional/Organizational connectedness
 
  5. Connectedness to information and ideas
 
  6. Religious/Transcendent connectedness
 
First there is the connectedness we are born into, 
familial connectedness.  Whoever has been a parent or a child 
knows of the primal strength of the parent-child bond.  In 
some ways, we might argue that the entire stories of our 
lives can be written in the terms of this bond, how it 
affected us, how it shaped us along the way.
 
 We live our lives amidst the voices and memories of 
mother and father, sibling and kin.  From the biological 
connecting that conceived us in the first place to the 
graveside where our loved ones bid us farewell, we are, most 
of us, never long unmindful of one or another of our parents 
or relatives.  That there is much conflict in the family 
story only indicates how much energy it contains, how much we 
infuse it with our basic hopes and expectations, while at the 
same time lashing to the disappointment and destruction that 
are our birthright as humans.
 
If you go back and look at families in dramatic 
literature, you read in the Greek tragedies that sparest of 
dialogue, the sinews of human experience.  The play centers 
around families, their connections and disconnections. 
 
Murder, revenge, jealousy, incest, self-mutilation 
abound. Royal families torn by passionate misunderstanding, 
woeful self-deception, what Aristotle called the tragic flaw.  
And if you leaf through Shakespeare, and his contemporaries 
for that matter, you find more of the same: great families 
warring within, murdering each other, taking revenge, all 
against a backdrop of passionate familial connectedness.  It 
is as if these characters, instead of taking their 
fundamental against life up with God or wrestling with an 
angel, go after each other, pounding out on the anvil of each 
other's bodies and souls their attempt at retribution and 
justice.
 
In modern drama by the likes of Chekhov, Ibsen and 
O'Neill, there is less murder, but equal intensity of family 
drama.  We see the beginning of the drama of the disconnected 
man in the plays of Beckett, Brecht, and Sartre.  Our 
peculiar twentieth century, with its wars and bombs and 
relativity and psychological-mindedness, seems to have done 
something to have disconnected us, from one another and from 
larger ideals and sustaining systems of belief, and from the 
family.  If you look at the great plays - and art in general 
- of the later part of our century, you find shadows of 
disconnectedness, man alone, with no exit, waiting, listening 
to music without melody, reading books without plots, 
reciting prayers without conviction.
 
Familial disconnectedness is perhaps best represented in 
the fact of homelessness.  Homelessness, which is not a 
metaphor but a stark fact can be seen as a kind of metaphor 
for the homelessness within us all.  Homelessness has become 
such a compelling phenomenon, one which even the cynic is 
hard-pressed to ignore, in part because, I think we, to some 
extent, identify with the homeless.  How far is each of us 
from homelessness?  Only a serious illness or an accident or 
a bad call by the referee away, perhaps. And we know this.  
And it scares us half to death.  Were we more connected as a 
society, were the extended family the active, vital force it 
once was, the homeless would be taken in by their own. 
Instead they are disowned, on their own.
 
The connectedness within families strengthens children - 
and that disconnectedness weakens them - has been 
demonstrated time and again.  Psychologist Mihaly 
Csikszentmihali and sociologist Eugene Rochberg-Halton in a 
study done in Chicago in the late '70s found that children of 
warm families, families whose members were connected and 
attentive to each other, were more sympathetic, helpful, 
supporting and caring.  The children from cool or 
disconnected families were less loyal, warm, friendly, 
sociable, and cooperative than the children from warm 
families.  And Judith Wallerstein, in her study of children 
of divorced families, found that many of those children were 
set adrift in their twenties, underachieving, failing to make 
lasting relationships, not finding a secure place for 
themselves in the world. 
 
As we shuffle and reshuffle the family and the roles 
within it, I think it is critical to keep in mind the primary 
importance of familial connectedness.  We trivialize it at 
our peril.  While one's ability to separate from one's family 
of origin has received a lot of attention in the 
psychological literature as a sign of mental health, the 
ability to preserve meaningful but not engulfing ties to 
one's original family can sustain one's sense of rootedness, 
tradition, and security in an increasingly rootless, 
traditionless, and insecure world.
 
The mention of rootedness and tradition brings me to the 
second kind of connectedness, which I call historical 
connectedness and which our current generation of children is 
in danger of losing altogether.  Without reading books, 
without having family stories told around a dining room table 
over and over again, without listening to folklore from 
Grandma and Grandpa, without participating in various 
rituals, ceremonies, or repeated outings that include 
evocations of the past, it is hard for a young person to 
learn about his or her personal past, to develop, a sense of 
historical connectedness.
 
In a completely different context, T. S. Eliot wrote a 
famous essay about originality and tradition in the 
development of the young poet titled "Tradition and the 
Individual Talent."  The essay lends itself to our 
consideration of how each new generation finds its place in 
history.  "Tradition," wrote Eliot, "is a matter of [wide] 
significance.  It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you 
must obtain it by great labor.  It involves in the first 
place the historical which we may call indispensable to 
anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-
fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception 
not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence..."
 
I would suggest that this historical sense is essential 
not only for the poet, but for anyone who would like to know 
who he or she is.  We need to understand and feel the 
presence of the past, as Eliot says, in our own lives - how 
prior generations turn up in current soup, not only 
genetically, but through customs, traditions, rituals, even 
feuds passed down over the years.
 
Eliot goes on:
 
What is to be insisted upon is that the...[individual] 
must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and 
that he should continue to develop this consciousness 
throughout [his life].  What happens is a continual surrender 
of himself as he is at the moment something which is more 
valuable.  The progress... is a continual self-sacrifice, a 
continual extinction of personality.
 
A continual extinction of personality?  Can you imagine 
a statement more antithetical to the message of self-focus 
and self-promotion our children receive in the media every 
day?
 
I hope it is not too much of a reach to relate T. S. 
Eliot's essay on poetry written in 1917, to the current 
scene, but to my mind it applies perfectly to the ideal of 
development of historical connectedness.  Each generation is 
altered by and alters the past. In order to know and feel 
this way, each generation must connect with the past.
 
I am not championing the study of history, although I do 
think that it is a very good thing.  Rather, I am stressing, 
for the sake of mental health and human growth, not to 
mention good poetry, the importance of knowing what has come 
before, and how you hook up to that, quarrel with it, change 
it and renew it.
 
Let me give you a personal example.  My two-and-a-half 
year old daughter's name is Lucy.  Right now she is a bouncy 
bundle of energy, curiosity, and most everything that is 
right with life.  As she grows older she will learn that her 
real name isn't Lucy but Lucretia Mott Hallowell.  She will 
know where the Hallowell came from, since Mom and Dad have 
that name, but she will probably wonder where such strange 
first and middle names came from: Lucretia Mott.  Then I hope 
her Mom and I will be able to tell her stories about her 
namesake, her great, great, great, great, great, grandmother, 
Lucretia Mott, a little Quaker lady with a stout Quaker heart 
who worked to free slaves and advance women in the second 
half of the nineteenth century.  Lucy will want to know about 
Lucretia Mott, why she got stuck with her name, what it meant 
back then to be an abolitionist and a feminist.  Lucy will 
get this bit of history, up close, as part of a family 
folklore, and she will take it in--and do something with it --
I don't know what -- as she develops a sense of who she is.  It 
is my hope that this bit of historical connectedness will be 
sustaining her; I know it will be meaningful as I know it 
will be meaningful as names always are.
 
Regardless of who your ancestry has in it, it is your 
ancestry, and it has done much to create you.  The family 
lines sustain us more the better we know them.  Seeking a 
personal definition, it can be just as useful to look back as 
to look within.  Children need to hear the folklore of the 
family.
 
When we lack historical connectedness, when we have only 
the present and only the individual personality, then we lack 
so very much.  We lack the reverberation and the echo of the 
past, the sense of largeness and sweep that the feeling of 
the past instills. Without the past, we go through it alone 
in the great house and listen to the clock tick.  But if we 
know that the very clock ticking now was ticking at our 
mother's birth, then we are not so alone, and we see in the 
hallway mirrors of not only our own reflection but the faces 
of generations past and their stories, conflicts, habits and 
customs, than we are less alone still.  If we pass on those 
stories to our own children and keep the past alive for them 
and us, even as the present changes the past as it does in 
our telling of it, we keep alive much more than old stories; 
we keep alive the historical connectedness that our children, 
and we, are so richly warm to.
 
Within the framework of historical connectedness I 
should mention another kind of connectedness which we do not 
have to work to acquire, but which accrues within us every 
minute of every day. This is the connectedness of memory, the 
connectedness to our own personal past which memory 
automatically wires up. Richer, deeper, more mysterious and 
complex than any bank of computers or any library archives, 
the human brain stores details and records events far beyond 
what we consciously control.  Through a complex and personal 
language of associations, our memories offer up little 
jewels, constantly matching this place and that, this 
person's to that, this lyric in a song to that dance we once 
had, this chance aroma to that breakfast scene, this 
sprightly cadenza to that original score.  Our memories are 
stitching and knitting all the time the fabulous tapestry of 
our associative inner lives so that we are, in our present 
lives, always connected through memory to the vastness of our 
pasts, in all the details and arresting vividness of the 
original events.  Just as the man in the post office took me 
back to the nutmeg in my grandmother's eggnog, so we are 
transported back and forth across the chasm in time that 
divides the here and now from the past, the then and the 
there we look back to.  As memory's cousin, anticipation, 
connects us to the future, so does memory keep us in touch 
with where we have been, ferrying us into the land of what is 
no more but once was so. Memory and anticipation change our 
landscape all the time.  As we live in the present, 
anticipation carries us into the future and memory conveys us 
into the past, so that we are suspended, as if in a hammock, 
by the poles of the past and the future over the whoosh of 
the ever-vanishing here and now.
 
This special connectedness with special parts of time, 
probably the fullest and richest connectedness we have, gives 
us the heartache of knowing what has come and gone, the 
comfort of reminiscing, the knowledge of growth, the 
fulfillment of taking stock, and the wisdom of perspective.  
Memory and anticipation keep us connected with ourselves.
 
From familial and historical connectedness, which define 
the rugged aspects of one's backbone, one's biologically 
received self, I take up the social connectedness we 
establish during a lifetime, the connectedness with other 
people, mainly of one's own choosing, and with one's 
community or locale.  We live in a time when neighborhoods, 
villages, and communities have broken down, so that the on-
street, built-in ways of making friends and establishing a 
local support network are not as at-hand as they were, say, 
two generations ago.  Nowadays, one must work and keep 
friends over time.
 
For children not having a viable neighborhood is less 
isolating because they still have the built in village called 
school.  The friendships children make in school, rough and 
tumble though they be at times, over time draw the child into 
a world of affiliation and relatedness, in counterbalance to 
the world of achievement and individualism school also offers 
up.
 
If our children are growing up, as I believe they are, 
in a disconnected world, it is of great importance that we 
pay attention to helping them forge different kinds of 
connectedness early on. I think one of the great challenges 
of the coming decades will be to create and preserve 
connectedness in the face of the disconnectedness our 
technology and social structure often encourage. 
 
Of the many points that could be made here, I wish to 
focus on one thought. It is by way of trying to answer my 
patients question, Why don't we just solve the problem of 
connectedness by just walking up to one another and asking. 
"Will you be my friend?" I would like to describe the 
psychological challenge we all contend with as we try to 
connect with each other.
 
While there is within us all a kind of drawing force, a 
powerful magnetic pull that leaves us leaning toward each 
other, reaching out, there is also a force in the other 
direction, the opposite pole of the magnet. pushing us apart, 
pulling back the hand before it reaches out, saying, "Do not 
connect, keep your bounds, play it close to the vest."
 
Where does this pulling away originate psychologically? 
What keeps us from finding greater protection through one 
another, instead menacing each other, attacking, or finding 
fault? D. W. Winnicott, the British pediatrician and 
psychoanalyst, said that the most difficult task in all of 
human development was coming to terms with our destructive 
feelings toward others. He said that in any close 
relationship there appears, in fantasy, sometime unconscious, 
sometimes not, the wish to destroy the other person.
 
 Destroy may seem too strong a word, but a relationship 
perforce destroys one's hope of the other person being under 
one's total control, at one's beck and call, all-giving, all-
caring.  In this sense, we destroy the other person; we 
destroy our infantile version of the other person as all-
gratifying en route to our being able to tolerate and then 
enjoy the other as an independent being.
 
In simple terms. the child -- or adult for that matter --
inevitably gets disappointed in any relationship because he or 
she does not have complex control over the other person. The 
other person is at times frustrating, in some way not giving 
what is wanted. If the relationship can survive this process 
of repeated destruction, then what results is genuine and 
useful connectedness. What so often happens, however, is at 
the moment of frustration the subject pulls away and 
withdraws.  rather than bearing with the tension, the subject 
pulls back thus avoiding frustration. However, the subject is 
now alone and disconnected.
 
 How common it is, this wish to destroy the other, and 
how often we back away from a relationship rather than deal 
with the unpleasant, destructive feelings we encounter.  
Getting past, or learning to live with, such feelings is a 
necessary prerequisite of genuine connectedness. There is 
more to being friends than being nice. One must tolerate very 
un-nice, aggressive feelings. Once a child can do this in a 
friendship, then the relationship can be meaningfully 
reciprocal.  We need to get comfortable with our destructive 
feelings-- not too comfortable, mind you, just comfortable 
enough not to have to hide them all the time.
 
The fourth kind of connectedness is connectedness to 
ideas and information.  I include ethical and moral thinking 
in this domain, although the roots of moral and ethical 
behavior extend in all domains.
 
Let's start with information. There is more information 
now than there has ever been. Only a few centuries ago, it 
was possible for a person to aspire to know all that is 
known. Now, with what is known increasingly exponentially, it 
is a major task just to keep abreast of even a very small 
field.  The idea of knowing everything is obsolete.
 
Stores of information have grown so vast that I would 
contend, our very connectedness to information itself is 
threatened.  It is a paradox that while we know more than we 
ever have, illiteracy is rising, the ability to use language 
is declining, and our children are disengaging from study at 
an alarming rate.
 
I think this relates to our connectedness to 
information.  By connectedness I do not mean just having the 
information. I mean the feeling of being comfortable  around 
information, of feeling supported, fed, and informed by it, 
rather than feeling threatened, starved or smothered by it. 
How many of us, and how many of our children, react to a new 
piece of data or a new technique with a sigh, a half-hearted 
camel's groan of one more straw being piled upon our heavily 
laden backs? 
 
Similarly, in the world of ideas one can know many 
thoughts, be able to recite the laws of thermodynamics or the 
principles in Aristotle's Poetics, but not feel helped or at 
home or happy with ideas in general. On the other hand, one 
might know no famous ideas, but still feel drawn to ideas and 
feel at home and warmed by thought. Curious children are good 
example of the latter.
 
I worry that our children are growing up disconnected 
from both information and ideas. While they are surrounded by 
information, they do not know what to do with it. While they 
may pursue ideas, as if browsing in a store, they do not 
connect with them in a meaningful way; they do not buy them 
and take them home and make them their own.  The subset of 
the world of ideas we call ethics and morality can seem 
strangely alien or quaint when the only meaningful morality 
appears embedded not in ideas but in expediency, luck, class 
privilege, or force.
 
With so much information available -- the skies are 
raining enough new information to drench us daily -- and with 
new ideas growing up to contain the information, there is a 
chance for young people to be knowledgeable and thoughtful as 
people have never had the chance to be before, and with that 
knowledge and thought to wield the power that naturally 
accompanies knowledge. But in order for young people to take 
advantage of this opportunity, they must feel comfortably 
connected to ideas and information. Ideas and information 
should be brought into their lives in such a way that they 
feel at ease with them and confident and eager at the 
prospect of new ones.  Their exposure to ideas and 
information should not be like taking a sip of water from a 
fire hose. Rather, it should be in a context that stresses 
mastery, manageability, and fun.
 
From ideas and information, I move to institutions and 
organizations.  Much of one's satisfaction day in and day out 
depends upon the degree of involvement and at-homeness one 
feels where one works- or in the case of children, where one 
learns.  Our degree of connectedness to institutions and 
organizations often reflects in a concrete way the degree to 
which we feel value and appreciated by the society we live 
in.
 
The last few decades have seen great changes in the 
individual's relationship to institutions and organizations, from 
the work place to local and national governments to clubs and 
societies. Since Vietnam and Watergate, the cynicism and 
disconnection many feel toward government has been growing.  
On the other hand, philosophies of management have been 
shifting toward a more democratic, involving style that 
invites participation by workers on all levels.  In 
education, many universities are trying to become what Zelda 
Gamson, a sociologist of education, calls "learning 
communities," with the emphasis not on hierarchy, but on 
collaboration. Schools, one of our most important social 
institutions, are stressed by the increasing demands put upon 
them and are looking for ways to involve parents, community, 
and whatever other resources can be marshaled to increase the 
connectedness within the school world.
 
Robert Bellah and his associates, in their two books  
_Habits of the Heart_ and _The Good Society_,  point to the need 
for fostering and developing affiliations and attachments 
within our institutions and organizations. And futurists 
Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book  _Powershift_ contend 
that as knowledge is shifting toward universal availability 
and ownership, so is the power that goes with it shifting 
toward a broad base, with emphasis on small cottage 
businesses that can be maximally creative and, if I may 
stress the word, connected.
 
The institutions and organizations that do best are the 
ones that pay attention to the connectedness within them.  They 
nurture their people. They attend to them. They listen to them. 
They know that they are their people.  It makes no business sense 
to have the people of the organization feeling cut off or 
left out. It makes much better business -- and psychological -- sense 
to connect them into a whole.
 
Yet the complaint that fills the hearts of so many who 
work in institutions, and this certainly includes teachers in 
schools, is one of feeling unappreciated, undervalued, even 
unknown. Teachers, who work so hard and do so much, are often 
left paying cheerful lip service to the good will of their 
schools, while underneath the chipper veneer they feel spent, 
at loggerheads with an administration that talks a good game 
but does not deliver the goods, and upset within themselves 
at the withering of their work ideals. Often they say, "if 
only once and a while my boss would walk through that door, 
look me in the eye, and, really meaning it, tell me, 'You're 
good.'"
 
What I am talking about here is not complicated 
psychology. It is really no more than an extension of what we 
were brought up calling politeness. You say hello when you 
pass someone. When you are waiting for the person behind the 
counter to pass you your bundles you might comment on the 
weather or the handsome new curtains they just installed. 
When you are paying your toll on the turnpike you make a 
comment to the person taking your money even if he or she 
looks the other way. You make a little chit-chat in the 
waiting room with the other person who looks uncomfortable 
being there. No matter what you are doing, you put aside 
everything else to make the other person feel comfortable and 
at ease first. You allow perhaps for there to be laughter 
before there is serious work, connectedness before 
productivity. In a world that is itching at every turn to 
dehumanize us all, you insist on being human first.
 
Until the rest of our society restores or recreates its 
interconnectedness, institutions in general and schools in 
particular will have to work hard to stay human. I believe, 
however, that schools have a unique opportunity to lead the 
way in recreating social connectedness we so disjointedly 
seek.
 
It is said that the coming decade will see the cocooning 
of the American family. Technology will allow most of the 
family's business to be conducted at home. Everything can be 
done at a keyboard: Order groceries and shop for other goods, 
write checks and conduct other banking business, consult a 
physician, rent a video tape, play games, run a business, 
even campaign for political office.
 
If we are to be increasingly cocooned, then, more than 
ever, schools and other institutions will have to respond to 
the ever increasing need for the sort of human connectedness 
that the cocooned family will inevitably -- and already does-
lack.
 
Finally, I take up my sixth and last category of 
connectedness, connectedness to what is beyond, call it 
religious or transcendent connectedness. Whatever it is 
called it makes sense of being a part of the largest of all 
things, the cosmic universe, and in that connection a 
fundamental feeling of being a part of something, rather than 
feeling alone.  Such connectedness, whether it be Buddhist 
Hindu or Christian or Jewish, whether it be one's personal 
system of belief or a miraculous sense felt once in a 
lifetime during a cloudburst, joins the individual with the 
unknown and unseen, with what happens before and after death, 
with what is eternal. If there is nothing before and after 
life, if the universe is a meaningless void, if human life is 
a biochemical coincidence signifying nothing beyond 
happenstance and chance, than religious connectedness is 
nothing more than an ironic joke, a wry smile upon an 
indifferent universe, a hallucination contrived by humanity 
to make sense of things.
 
But if it is the case that there is an energy behind the 
mystery, a meaning beyond existence then the intimations that 
we may feel that connect us to our god, whatever they may be, 
serve to focus our faith and create the connection found in 
prayer, meditation, or other transient devotion or 
cogitation.
 
Though unseen and unprovable, this connection can be 
felt as the surest connection we have. Take as an example 
of this, from the tradition that I know best, the 
extraordinary statement by Paul in his letter to the Romans 
in the New Testament:
 
    Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
 
    Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or 
 
         famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
 
    Nay, in all these things we are more than 
 
         conquerors through him that loved us.
 
    For I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, 
 
         nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present 
 
         nor things to come,
 
    Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 
 
         shall be able to separate us from the love of God.
 
 
Whether or not we feel the absolute connectedness Paul 
feels, I think most of us have felt at one time or another a 
murmuring in our hearts that bespeaks a possible connection 
to something beyond.
 
However, we must be careful.  As our methods of 
discourse and discovery change, it is important to know of 
our capacity for and need of spiritual connectedness.  
Particularly for our young people, who are at risk of being 
more a lost generation than the generation Gertrude Stein 
intended that term for, we need to help them watch out for 
those who would exploit their spiritual hunger for financial or 
political gain or for power and control.  The list of 
charlatans and crooks posing as ministers to spiritual need 
is alarmingly long of late.  While we certainly do not want 
to dictate how or what anyone worships, still we do not want 
to condone the appalling financial and spiritual rip-off that 
is the big business of Swaggart and Bakker, these sects take 
advantage or the power of the need for connectedness and 
commit the most awful deception in the process.
 
But if we look past the deceptions that have been committed 
so often in the name of God and consider spiritual connectedness 
as the genuine human concern that it is, we see there is an 
undisputed mystery that surrounds our lives on this planet.  
We don't know for sure why we're here, where we've been or 
where we're headed.  We don't know why we suffer or why we 
thrive or why we were born or why we die.  But we do wonder 
about these things.
 
How we engage this mystery defines our spiritual 
connectedness.  Whether we do it alone or in a group, whether 
we do it under a banner or without formal ties, whether we do 
it systematically and at a scheduled time or spontaneously 
when we are so moved, whether we do it out of fear or 
obligation or love or curiosity of hunger, whether we do it 
with full faith or full of skepticism, whether or not we know 
what we're doing when we do it, we all engage somehow at some 
time, with the mystery of life.  It is at times embarrassing 
in this very scientific century to talk of things like 
mystery and faith and God, because most of our intellectual 
tools seem geared up for other things, and yet even as we 
turn away from them we find ourselves face to face with them 
once again.
 
This brings me to the end of my discussion of different 
kinds of connectedness.  The list is meant to be suggestive 
and is by no means exhaustive.  There are as many kinds of 
connectedness as there are people, places, and ideas to 
connect with.  My categories have sketched in just a few.  I 
have tried to emphasize what I think will be a central 
problem for children and adults in the coming decades.  While 
we are prepared to attend to children's competence, I think 
we must equally prepare to address their connectedness in its 
many spheres.
 
Let me close by going back with you to where this paper 
began, in Harvard Square, in the P. O., late on a graying 
afternoon just before Christmas.
 
Leaving the P. O., I blew air into my cupped hands to 
warm them.  The lights of the city decorated what otherwise 
would have been a drab sky.  Shoppers hurried in and out of 
stores while other people just sort of milled about, not 
quite sure what their next move would be.  There was the 
Salvation Army band, and I wondered why I got so moved at the 
sound of that humble brass ensemble, but I did.  The present 
was staying just one step ahead of my past as memories weaved 
around me as if they were other pedestrians, bumping into me, 
politely excusing themselves, moving along.
 
Until one grabbed me by the shoulder.  A pedestrian, 
that is. "Aren't you..."
 
"Yes," I quickly answered.  "Amazing just to bump into 
you like this!"  It was Mr. Magruder, my fifth-grade history 
teacher, one arm full of bundles and all of him full of 
memories.  We gabbed a little bit.  I don't remember what I 
said because I was preoccupied with recollection.  He must 
have thought I was addled. I wanted to take him and walk 
right back to our schoolhouse or out onto the soccer field 
where he taught me to kick with my instep instead of my toe.  
The moment was cut short, of course, by time, and we said 
goodbye.
 
The next stops were Reading International, Crate and 
Barrel, and the Loeb Drama Center to pick up some tickets.  
This was an area to town I knew well, having gone to school 
here and lived here for twenty years.
 
I stopped for a minute and looked above the roofs at the 
sky. There was just enough contrast to give a difference 
between the gray sky and the black roofs, all offset by the 
neon signs and city decorations which glowed, like 
footlights, below the skyline.  Here we all are, I thought to 
myself.  For at least this one minute, we're all here, now, 
together.
 
How many people are there around the city who are alone? 
I wondered.  Who's having a fight, who's breaking up, who's 
making up, who's looking for a way to start off fresh, who 
needs a friend? What is the glue anymore that holds us all 
together?  Was there ever any?
 
So much of my glue came from my teachers.  I have loved 
my teachers, so many of them, from grade school on up.  Bill 
Alfred, professor of English at Harvard and my tutor when I 
was there, used to have me into his house on Athens Street 
and we read plays, and I felt drawn to him and to the plays 
and to the words and to the larger world that seemed to grow 
before me as I lived on into it. Fred Tremallo, my old 
English teacher at Exeter, was like a father, getting me to 
look up words in the dictionary when I didn't want to and 
telling me about his Italian ancestry.  And Mrs. Eldredge, my 
first-grade teacher, who found out I had dyslexia, kept me 
close to her, right near her side, near here dresses with 
apples on them and her powder I can still smell, as she did 
what would now be called tutoring me but which then felt like 
love.  I could never tell them all how much they meant even 
if I spent a lifetime trying.  Would they want to hear?  Just 
the facts.  Nothing cheap.
 
As I heard the Salvation Army band still playing its 
tromboned carols, I thought of how much pain there was in the 
city that night, any night, and how much we needed each other 
to stave it off or take it in and put it behind, again and 
again.  We've all been hurt.  We need to know how to find a 
place to take us in.
 
I heard the band die out at the end of a chord.  Then 
silence, like the moment after you say goodbye.  They must 
have reached the end of their day.  I could imagine them 
packing up their instruments and pot-bellied donation 
canister and saying goodbye. They would be back, I imagined, 
I hoped.  People return.  People come back to give what they 
gave before until they can't do it anymore.  
 
"Only connect," E. M. Forster said.  That evening, under 
the chilly skies of Cambridge, I understood what he meant.