On the subway home from this meeting, I sketched out the skeleton of a post riffing on the conversation we had there. I just came across those notes again, and though I don’t have time right this minute to write them up into a full essay, I figure I might as well put them out there anyway. I welcome comments and questions, and if you’d like to see the longer version, feel free to prod me.

How are students brought into a movement?

  1. By being met where they are.
  2. By being given a sense of the possible.
  3. By feeling their power.
  4. By confronting their powerlessness.
  5. By experiencing a one-to-one connection.
  6. By experiencing community.

(This is really less a set of six principles than three sets, each made up of two principles in tension with one another. As the physicist Niels Bohr once said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”)