Dr. Grauer's Column - Shadow School: Where Something Is Wrong—but No One Will Say It

Shadow School: Where Something Is Wrong—but No One Will Say It
(A Martin Luther King Jr. Day Reflection)
By Stuart Grauer

Editorial Note:  I wrote this piece slowly, and more than once—not from certainty, but from calling. Like many teachers, I sense that something feels different lately, though it’s not easy to name.

In schools, we are trained to be careful with language—to protect the conditions that allow thoughtful, Socratic learning to happen. At the same time, we are entrusted with something more fragile: the moral and academic climate in which our young students learn how to notice the world, speak about it, and live inside their uncertainty (and sometimes conflict).

These reflections are not offered as politics or historical judgments. They are a teacher’s attempt to model attention, honesty, and care at a moment when those qualities feel like they are growing harder to model. Can we talk about it?

A Fearless Teaching Reflection

“Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
- Rumi, Sufi poet

For many people this year, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, the main event was football—legitimate battle. A nationally watched NFL game held the afternoon’s attention. Late in the third quarter, play stopped after a violent collision at midfield. Many in the stadium were not sure what they had just seen. The officials halted the game and turned, as they now always do, to the replay booth.

 There, NFL replay officials—working from the league’s centralized command center in New York, surrounded by banks of high-definition monitors receiving synchronized feeds from every camera in the stadium—slowed the footage down frame by frame, removed from the noise and momentum of the field, to decide a single question:

 What actually happened?

 That moment—the pause, the uncertainty, the appeal to some distant, real authority—felt familiar. Not because of football, but because of the time we are living in. These feel like hard days—not because one terrible or confusing thing is happening, but because many signals suggest something is unfolding, and the field keeps shifting. Distraction layers on distraction. Explanations multiply. “Everybody’s under investigation,” my childhood friend Jeff says. If you try to follow the patterns, they blur, rearrange themselves, and slip just out of focus. And a bit of guilt creeps in—the guilt of sensing that something matters, but not knowing whether, how, or when it is safe to say so out loud. I asked a history teacher what moments like this feel like from inside her classroom, where these issues simply have to come up. She smiled, knowingly, and said, “It’s complicated.”

What makes this moment especially disorienting is the constant shifting of the lens. Extreme cruelty sits next to ignorance, bravado, and astonishing dishonesty, all wrapped in language about purpose, power, or “taking things back.” It’s presented not as harm, but as mission. Not as exclusion, but as certainty and bold leadership. We’re supposed to feel inspired, or safe. Many don’t.

For some, it feels like a paradigm shift, a conjuring below the surface, some new order taking shape that we may or may not want. For others, it’s a mess. A strange reality. Worse, it’s the kind of mess you can’t really talk about—at school, at parties, or even out in the surf.

This feeling has a long history.

The fantastical version: times long ago when Indigenous civilizations in the Americas first saw European ships on the horizon. Some accounts describe not immediate terror, but disbelief—no one responded much. It seemed like a dream, something that could not be named or perhaps even believed was heading their way. There it was: Cortez dancing across the water towards Montezuma in the dazzling-sun floating city. The mind often tries to protect itself by assuming what it sees cannot be real. It must be a trick of light. A dream. Our own mind playing tricks.

When we look back on history, what was unthinkable to the mainstream often has become obvious. We wonder how people didn’t see it sooner. But history rarely feels obvious when you’re inside it.

Another version occurred during periods of upheaval in 17th-century England, when political and religious power swung back and forth. Speaking too honestly—on either side—and off with your head, or perhaps public humiliation. Going along and agreeing with the King when he was in power, or with the Puritans when they were, became a form of self-protection, hiding by going along and blending in. But it launched a new nation. The New World. Here we are!

In 1930s Germany, many ordinary people did not wake up one morning to a fully formed nightmare. What they experienced first was confusion. Rules changed. Language shifted. Groups were singled out “temporarily.” Each step was framed as a policy adjustment, necessary, or patriotic. Daily life continued. Children went to school and teachers taught their lessons. It wasn’t that everyone agreed—it was that many people didn’t yet know how to name what they were seeing, or they could tell it was not okay to name it. It’s not ironic that perhaps the most famous real-time document from that era was the secret diary of a little girl (Anne Frank).

We’re obviously not in Nazi Germany, or a vessel sailing towards a New World, but we can learn from them: every day, life and schooling continue even as norms quietly shift.

These examples are not about comparison—we’re not them. The examples are about human perception—about how difficult it is to recognize a moral shift while it is underway, especially when everyday life still looks mostly familiar: I surfed today, ate pizza, and read a great book. Pattern: normal life. Like a parallel world, there’s all this news streaming in from outside this direct experience I have. Some of it upsetting. And I don’t always experience it as real. What is it? Jeff asks me, “What’s going on?” as if I should know.

A Lesson from Psychology

There is a well-known psychology experiment that sheds light on this human tendency to adapt without noticing the cost. In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted what became famously known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. College students were randomly assigned roles as “guards” or “prisoners” in a simulated jail. No one was instructed to be cruel. No one was told to abuse power.

And yet, within days, many of the students playing guards began acting harshly and dehumanizingly, while those playing prisoners became passive, anxious, and withdrawn. The study (and another one, too, the mind-blowing Milgram Experiment) was shut down early because the behavior escalated so quickly.

It was only a research experiment, not real life but its basic insight remains: roles, authority, and ambiguity can change human behavior faster than our human conscience can keep up. We adjust. We can normalize even absurdity. We tell themselves this is simply how things work now.

Most Stanford Prison participants did not experience themselves as choosing cruelty.
They experienced themselves as doing their job. Having an identity. We seem to need all that. Teaching high school, it can be a little scary to see how far people might go simply to matter. That seems to be a bigger need than truth.

A signal: Political litigation has increased sharply. “Everybody’s under investigation”—not only over elections, but over speech, authority, policy, and power. Increasingly, disagreements that once relied on shared norms move quickly into court…as if those norms can no longer be trusted by regular people. And it’s hard not to notice a recent shift in our language. Almost anything is called “weaponized”—information, speech, institutions, even empathy.

What does it mean for teaching and learning—places that depend on trust, good faith, and the assumption that disagreement does not automatically signal danger and threat—but rather, deep discourse and seeking first to understand.

Schools and the Fog of Adaptation

Schools are places of constant motion: Classes shift. Emails arrive. Programs come and go. Policies are re-written. But there behind the classroom doors, teachers—often wisely—focus on what is directly in front of them: students, lesson plans, care.

But constant motion makes pattern recognition hard. Inside, the classroom will have to be influenced by the outside world on some level, no matter the standard curriculum. Won’t it?

We watch all this change, but we teachers live in a professional culture that prizes appropriateness and harmony. Teachers begin to feel that something is off, but we struggle to say what. Or we name it privately, but not publicly. We’re talking in riddles. Maybe we put up some posters. Or we wait—for more data, a clearer signal, a safer moment.

This isn’t cowardice. It’s adaptation. It’s a job. Up to a point.

But adaptation has a cost. When we stop questioning the values we see at play out loud, we don’t become neutral—we drift away from those values. Over time, what once would have felt alarming begins to feel normal—not because it is okay, not because it hasn’t gotten under our skin, but because we’ve adjusted our expectations to get through the day.

Then the Quiet Part is Said Out Loud

And then, every so often, the fog lifts just enough for someone to say the quiet part straight up. For instance, last week, White House adviser Stephen Miller told news caster Jake Tapper: “We live in a world… governed by strength… by force… by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”  Miller seemed to be saying: “There, I’ve finally said it out loud!”

I don’t quote this from a place of certainty or politics. That remark unsettled me and I hope it unsettled all teachers. Not only for its affront to the Golden Rule and the core values of most schools I’ve ever seen, but because it shows a partial truth leaders recognize: power can re-shape our world, and strength really can sometimes protect what’s fragile.

What troubled me was the claim presented not as a choice, but as inevitability—where restraint and compassion become weakness and good faith a liability. That worldview doesn’t announce cruelty. It is stated as “being real”: if you don’t see it, you are cast as “a sucker.” The trouble is, when this way of thinking enters public life, it creates a tension for institutions, like schools, that depend on trust, restraint, and good faith to function at all. There, I’ve said it.

Can our students hold two, opposite perspectives at the same time? Are we aware that they may be experiencing the oppositeness? Because learning multiple perspectives is the basis of the democracy we are teaching them to lead in this rising generation. And sometimes that means living with open questions.

Just days earlier, footage circulated widely of a civilian legal observer being killed during a public law-enforcement action in Minnesota. The video was viewed by millions, replayed endlessly, and yet somehow not fully seen in any shared way.

Almost immediately, public figures and institutions offered sharply different interpretations of what the footage showed—often shaped less by the images themselves than by what was most politically convenient to claim—the view that would empower them. Watching this unfold, I found myself back on the football field: Where were the replay officials? Where was the shared commitment to slow the moment down and study: what actually happened?

The facts were visible. Rather than clarity, such as teachers seek with their students for a living, it seemed like all we got was fracturing.

Are we teachers even allowed to talk about all this in school? I have a master’s degree in history education and have trained scores of teachers, and I don’t even know. It is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and here is what Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

To my colleagues/teachers and students, let’s be neither of those. 

We have the ability to choose not to see what is right before our eyes—or to see. Cortez was real. In Minnesota, a woman was dead.

Equally surreal and impossible to grasp in Minnesota, the very next week, the US House of Representatives voted to allow toxic mining pollution in the Boundary Waters—a death sentence for so much life.

When force and greed are described as natural law rather than ethical and personal choices, trust outside your group becomes lost—trust is for the suckers. Restraint becomes weakness. Good faith becomes an illusion. But trust and restraint and good faith matter for schools and for teachers of conscience. We can’t even have a school without them.

The whole point of The Grauer School and ultimately many small learning communities is to give learners a real voice. When people are repeatedly unable to use that voice—when they sense something is wrong but feel it is unsafe or inappropriate to say so—the cost does not disappear. It turns inward. Some grow anxious. Some become depressed. Others carry a low, simmering anger or fear they cannot quite explain. It’s what Carl Jung described as the shadow self—the parts of ourselves that we push out of conscious awareness rather than integrate.

Unless maybe you’re a monk, silence does not always produce neutrality or peace; it produces distress. Or frustration. Why are we “really” rooting for the Chicago Bears or watching the symphony or talking politics? Everything gets complicated. And over time, institutions may continue to function, but the people inside them begin to feel like they matter less.

What Schools Are Built to Protect

I’ve spent my life in schools because I believe trust and good faith are not sentimental ideals. They are fragile conditions that teachers and, especially school leaders, are there to protect and cultivate. When they erode, our schools may still function—but they begin to teach something different than they claim.

The great schools are among the few institutions organized around a different premise than Miller expressed:

• that power must be bounded
• that the vulnerable deserve protection and voice
• that restraint can be a form of strength!
• that truth requires care (of head and heart)

So, when a force-first worldview is presented as realism, even silent educators feel the tremor—even if they can’t or won’t always name it. Usually they don’t feel free to speak about it, or free to risk offending someone.

But that’s not what real teachers do, or not my real teachers. Real teachers go straight into what is “there,” they go to the center of the question, no hiding.

What Students are Already Learning

Whether we talk about it or not, students are watching how adults handle confusion, contradiction, and moral tension we feel even while we are just eating pizza on a regular day.

They notice it when adults:

• avoid naming obvious inconsistencies
• soften language to the point of emptiness
• treat questions about universal values as impolite or impractical
• model silence as sophistication and tolerance (when it is really avoidance)

If confusion and conflict are never questioned, students learn that their confusion should be hidden. Luckily, fearless teaching does not require answers. It requires honesty about the questions. It requires asking bigger, better questions. Listening bigger.

Before Clarity Arrives

In sum: most moments of historical shift rarely feel dramatic or believable at first. Especially at school, they feel vague, like whispers. Inconvenient. Awkward to bring up. Like something we’ll understand better later.

By the time things are unmistakable and students and teachers start talking about them, choices are fewer—and many of us are marginalized.

Historically, schools (at least western and U.S. schools) are sanctuaries of free thought. So the work of teachers—especially now—is not to give lectures on their judgements, but to somehow role-model habits we ought to take on faith: factual observation based on references, naming what values we are after, respectful disagreement that doesn’t “take it personally,” and the courage to ask bigger questions. My favorite: “What if…?”

This work is often invisible, sometimes censored, and sometimes lonely (and can cost you friends or jobs). 

The Open Questions

--What do we teach students when we refuse to name the values we see are at play?
--What do we model when we rush past discomfort and fear instead of inviting it in?
--And what might fearless teaching look like right now, while things still seem unclear and we know no consensus can form?

If we appear to be taking sides, our question was not big enough to keep our students and one another towards shared, more universal values. Asking fearless and bigger questions and receiving answers with an open heart helps us and our students be on the lookout as those ships get nearer. If schools cannot be places where uncertainty is spoken aloud with care, and people can try out ideas, then students will learn that silence—not fearlessly pursuing ideas—is the acceptable way to show intelligence.

On the night before his assassination, Martin spoke not of certainty or safety, but of living in a time of trouble and confusion—and acting anyway. He did not claim to see the whole path ahead. He just refused to look away from what was clear and headed right this way. He often warned that moral life erodes when we habitually practice silence. From this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I wish us all better, bigger questions, towards a more shared understanding.

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