An educational theorist takes on Cold War animus and callous attitudes

“Ripplework is all over the place,” says pedagogical scholar Lena Redman. “There is no one central point.”

Redman’s 2020 book, I Really Do Care, Shouldn’t We All?: From Sputnik to Trump and Socialism, is both an explanation of ripplework—a theory Redman developed through her doctoral research into educational methods—and an example of that theory in action. The book is organized into “ripples” rather than chapters, and Redman takes a nonlinear approach to her arguments. “People want to have a linear approach and want to start from Point A and go to Point B and finish at Point C,” she says, but like overlapping ripples on a pond, the book moves in several directions at once. 

“That’s why I couldn’t take it to a publisher,” she explained. Although Redman, a former graphic designer, now secondary school teacher, who recently earned a doctorate in education, first turned her research into a traditionally published book (Knowing With New Media: A Multimodal Approach for Learning), she knew that in order to fully develop and implement her theory, she would have to produce something that was unconventional.

Education, as Redman sees it, reflects and reproduces social structures. “They cannot exist without each other,” she says. In the book, she connects “I Don’t Care” culture to the education system that grew out of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly once the launch of Sputnik brought a new focus to scientific and technical skills: 

It was suggested that the Sputnik moment became a catalyst in creating an educational environment conducive to the cultivation of IDC psychological features. IDC attitudes were further promoted by an extreme emphasis on science/technology. Market areas of knowledge were later added to the school curriculum. This resulted in the narrowing of specialized disciplinary skills and competencies, widening the gap between learning about connections between, for example, the natural sciences and the economy, on one hand, and the sociological imagination (self vs. society) on another. The implementation of standardized testing in education that resulted from responses to the launch of Sputnik by the Soviets in 1957 has further drawn apart the domains of the exact sciences and the humanities. A standardized system of education where essential aspects of the human character, such as collaboration, communication, creativity, and individual agency, became superfluous has also largely contributed to the development of the IDC culture.

Education, as Redman sees it, reflects and reproduces social structures. “They cannot exist without each other,” she says. That’s why she finds the U.S. response to Sputnik so troubling: Redman believes the United States and its educational system “actually became more and more like that socialistic Soviet world rather than standing for their values and who they are.” In the 21^st century, she sees something similar happening with “factory-farming-type institutions where children really need to pass the test. That’s basically what all education is about: to get the right marks and satisfy the standards in order to get into further education.”

Redman’s worldview is shaped in part by her experience of growing up in the former Soviet Union, then traveling to the West and ultimately settling in Australia. I Really Do Care opens with the story of Redman, her husband, and their two young children leaving their homeland in 1991 under the guise of taking a short vacation. Leaving the Soviet Union was “such a great shock,” she said.

As the family adapted to life in a Hungarian refugee camp and then to a series of new homes in different countries, Redman realized that the people she met had developed a sense of themselves and their relationships to others that was a profound shift from what she was used to. “Even talking to each other was so different,” she says. “Seeing the world through certain lenses changes your understanding of who you are, especially who you are in relation to people.” For Redman, the most important part of emigration was the possibilities it allowed her children to explore. “Leaving Russia was about providing them with an environment where they could become free people, and where they could do what they wanted, rather than being told how to live and what to read and what to sing and so forth,” she says, adding that her son and daughter both thrived in their new home.

Redman’s experience in a totalitarian society also shaped how she thinks about political leadership and the concept of freedom, two other topics she explores in the book. “Living in Russia and thinking about that amazing world of democracy somewhere else, coming to that world, and suddenly seeing people who say ‘it never was democracy, it never was good, it never was what you think it was’—in my mind, you don’t know what it’s like,” she says. “It is difficult even to comprehend how people take for granted such a precious thing as being free.”

Because of her appreciation for freedom and democracy, Redman was particularly concerned by Donald Trump’s presidency, and she believes that the United States is at an inflection point, undergoing “a shaking, maybe even a breaking of social order”—a change that will have a lasting impact on the rest of the world. Trump appears frequently in the book, both as the epitome of the “I Don’t Care” attitude and as a threat Redman compares to some of the leaders she grew up with.

Kirkus Reviews notes that “Redman’s narrative is insightful and informative, with ample sociological, psychological, and literary references. A chapter comparing the personality of Trump to Soviet dictators Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin is particularly compelling as the author draws parallels among the three men whose rhetorical styles lean heavy on hyperbolic self-aggrandizement and who revel in their cultlike following.”

Redman has high hopes for developing ripplework into a full pedagogical system, and creating videos, a website, and supplementary materials for I Really Do Care is her current focus. “That’s my day and night and in-between job,” she says. “I’m concentrating and believing in my model and the pedagogical approach I’m trying to develop.” In the coming months, she will be developing the concept further and implementing it, testing out the pedagogical model with participants from around the world. She knows that persuading the world’s educators to adopt a new, more holistic and inclusive approach to education is a significant challenge, but she believes it will be worth it. If students are able to move from “I Don’t Care” culture to ripplework, Redman says, they will be able to “know themselves what they can actually do in this world, and trust themselves.”