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Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, is trying to make life difficult for the incoming Kash Patel, even though he is leaving. By promoting loyalists, he is pushing them into decision-making positions so that reforms can be stymied. Wray is apparently determined to wreak havoc by giving his successor headaches from day one. Mr. Patel should not take the bait!

Many decades ago, the Department (Board) of Education of the City of New York had a division called The Bureau of Child Guidance. It was the mental health unit that serviced all school children.

New psychologists on the Board had to immerse themselves in a year’s internship. They spent four days a week toiling in the schools, but on Fridays, they gathered from all over the city and continued their education. There were morning academic lectures and afternoons spent in group therapy sessions.

Thus, twenty percent of their productive time was given over to training. No coercion! No harangues! No re-education! Just academic pursuits. Patel might learn from this approach. Instead of facing down his opponents (unless they are incorrigible troublemakers), he should think about weekly mandatory group learning sessions. There’s even a good model for this.

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Mr. Patel, if you have never attended a traditional Orthodox Jewish school (Yeshivah), spend a few hours of your precious time in such an institution. You will see the students hunched over ancient texts, reading them aloud to their study partner. Dyadic learning, where each student makes sure his partner has the same understanding as he does, is the method of choice in such institutions. Students can spend three months on a single page. A group of ‘learners’ gather in my synagogue every Saturday afternoon and have been engaged with a single tractate of the Talmud for the past fifteen years.

In Yeshiva, other tranches of time are spent in larger groups listening to an expert teacher hold forth on a particular concept based on textual sources. During these larger group sessions, students can ask questions, and teachers will answer them. Sometimes, students ask and other students answer.

Using the Yeshiva model, Patel could mandate dyadic learning where the text to be studied would be The Gulag Archipelago by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. This work should be required reading for all high school students in the United States—but it isn’t, perhaps because it comes in three volumes totaling approximately 2,700 pages. It would be sufficient for many years of material, maybe decades. At the FBI, each 45-minute session would consist of partners reading to each other, with the last ten or fifteen minutes spent reviewing the contents they had just covered.

A second session for the FBI staff would see someone from a local university discussing Stewart Kauffman’s The Origins of Order. This book is challenging since it includes concepts in biology, physics, chemistry, and math. It’s challenging because it reflects a contrasting reality where the true complexity of human existence is revealed. In such a learning environment, simple beliefs are not challenged directly but through exploration. That is why a teacher of considerable accomplishment is necessary for explaining The Origin of Order.

These two works, The Gulag Archipelago and The Origins of Order, and these two types of learning sessions, do not require the production of cookie-cutter conclusions. The lessons derived in the give-and-take battle between two learning partners or during the small-group experience are broadening because of the freeing-up of the learning format. The constant questioning is both annoying and liberating. How absolutely refreshing not to be told what to conclude!

These forms of learning foster a ‘meta’ attitude in people once they experience it. It sets their minds free. “Look! I can run around instead of march.”

It does not take long until the freedom to question becomes part of the mental world of the individual participants. In this way, people who have been hammered into submission can learn once again to express themselves.

The contents of The Gulag Archipelago can liberate people. The admixture of human degradation and the mental survival mechanisms of the individual who has been degraded opens the reader’s mind. The deep feelings of people under duress describe the human condition that is always on the edge of chaos and destruction. Each reader in a dyad will become part of Solzhenitsyn’s world gone mad.

How would your employee react when confronted with demands to march lockstep? To date, FBI employers have already been forced to conform. Their salaries, pensions, and healthcare constantly scream that they must conform or be severely punished.

These two learning experiences, both their methods and their contents, offer possibilities not yet considered or understood by most of your potential participants. That is what education does! It offers alternatives. Education brings light.

If FBI employees, for personal constitutional reasons, cannot adapt to group learning, they should be removed from agency employment. Such people lack the flexibility and empathetic facility to avoid corruption or will even foster it due to individual rot.

Most employees would profit from this learning experience, from the topmost echelons, including yourself, to the people who clean your offices at night. The human contact of group learning has its own influence on personality development, while the recommended books claw back humanity into the learners’ lives. It is worth a shot!