What does continuation high school, mediation, and Shakespeare have in common? A continuation high school is a school in California where students either choose or are sent to make up the grades they lost while behaving badly in regular schools. I taught in a continuation high school for 13 years. I have always loved Shakespeare, and believe he has masses to tell us if we give him the time and patience to read, watch, and listen. How does that lead us to mediation?
Mediators meet strangers already engaged in seemingly titanic struggles with someone, or a group of people, that they find challenging to resolve. In those circumstances, we, as mediators, must enter into a contract in which our job is mainly to listen, and then help them to re-frame the argument in ways that they will hopefully use to compromise and settle.
Shakespeare, in Hamlet, says to his best friend from school, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” By his ‘philosophy’, I think he means, in Horatio’s worldview. In another, less well-known Shakespeare play named after the title character, Coriolanus tells the crowd who are screaming that he should be banished, “I banish you!” and then goes on to say, “There is a world elsewhere.”
As a high school English teacher, I learned that part of my job was not just to teach them ‘stuff’. It was to help them re-frame their damaged lives so they could understand that the world was far larger than the present circumstances of their lives and cultures dictated; to go beyond what their neighborhoods and families had constructed in their forming minds, and to try to discover all the worlds inside them.
Mediators do much the same thing. We challenge our clients to think about the “…more things in Heaven and Earth…” than they have until that moment considered. You may call it the thinking out of that infernal box cliché, but I think the ask is bigger than that. Mediators do not teach; we challenge, we question strategically, and offer different perspectives, and within those perspectives, different choices, choices that were heretofore not apparent to the quarreling parties.
When it all seems to be beyond our powers of healing to resolve, we may be tempted to throw our arms up in the air in frustration and exclaim, as Puck does in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Lord, what fools these mortals be”. If not, then it may be good to remind our clients, as Prospero says in The Tempest, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Make of that what you will.