8: Social Issues and Decision Making: A Career-Long Commitment

My commitment to the development of what I refer to as a “democratic curriculum” draws upon a wide range of experiences, both personal and professional. Family, schooling, books, mentors, colleagues, and friends, in good measure, explain my emphasis on an Issues-centered Decision Making Curriculum. These influences are also operative with those colleagues who share similar views. However, when individuals reduce these categories to their own specific experiences, their stories become distinctive, one from the other.

In this essay, I will limit my comments to a few of these experiences. Primary importance for the views I hold must be given to a remarkable set of parents. Political refugees from Communist Russia in the 1920s, they immigrated to Montreal, Canada. These parents and their dramatically changed lives could not help but teach me about political strife and political systems—czarism, communism, and democracy. Certainly, such experiences were common to other immigrants who felt a high level of gratitude for a new life in a new and freer nation. My parents were never able to see their families again, nor were they ever able to resume the privileged lives they had lived in “the old country.” They struggled with a new language and adapted to a new culture—tasks that challenged many immigrants.