Wisdom isn’t something we get. It is something we do.
—Diana Butler Bass
Learning begins on the first day of life—and not the first day of class.
—Dana Suskind & Lydia Denworth
A good friend of mine (and fellow graduate student at the time) once looked across a shared meal with me at the Cheddars near Vanderbilt University and observed, “it’s never silent in there is it?” A little startled at her astuteness, I nodded in the affirmative (having been well trained by my mother and grandmothers “not to talk with my mouth full”) and eventually replied that no, my brain was always “ON,” laser-focused, 24/7, 365. It was, indeed, never silent.
It is why to this day, large crowd situations drive me crazy—I already have more than enough stimulus on the inside, thank you!—and it is why even my daydreams regularly have almost Walter Middy level detail to them. I continually have a wide range of ideas bouncing off each other in my head, waiting to see if any pattern emerges, looking for the structures on which I can hang some thoughts, and as a voracious reader, I am always adding to the bounce pile.
I share this bit of self-knowledge because readers might look at my actual list of references for this latest offering to my LAC project and wonder what chemicals I have been ingesting to think they have anything in common. But if folks will be patient, I promise to reveal the unique tapestry I believe they offer about some important choices we face as both a culture and a society when it comes to education and our children.
The weaving begins when my mother recently introduced me to Diana Butler Bass, and a blog she writes, called The Cottage. Bass was reflecting on ideas I’ve already explored in my recent series on time and education—how “not everything happens for a reason” and how “life can be so absurd”—when she caught my attention with an idea which both Burkeman and May (whose work I have been recently exploring) hint at but never overtly acknowledge: everything may not happen for a reason, “but everything that happens matters. Because it is the one life each of us has” (Bass; my emphasis).
And at no time in life is this more true—or more critical—than early childhood. For example, we have known for years that the early interactions between parent and infant are critical for proper language development and emotional maturation and that there is a direct correlation between the quantity of words an infant is exposed to—as well as the amount of direct parent-infant/toddler exchanges—and their later success in school, both academically and behaviorally.
But new research shows that the quality of words is even more of a predictor of language development; hence, the richness of the parent/child dialogue matters more than we once thought, and what’s more, brain scans have revealed that the connections between caregivers and the very young occur at the actual neural level as these dialogues are taking place. Or to put it simply, when parent and infant are interacting, their brain waves literally sync up. Doing so then leads to the reinforcement of brain patterns in the infant that lead to better social learning, problem-solving skills, and vocabulary development later in life—all the foundation for future learning success. Hence, “research strongly supports the need for parents to have time with their children [and] underlines why parents need access to high-quality affordable childcare” for those times requiring a non-parental adult caregiver (Suskind & Denworth, p. 52).
Yet unlike every other industrialized nation on this planet, the United States has no national parental leave policy whatsoever, and even where individual states have passed parental leave laws, they almost always involve unpaid time off, guaranteeing only a job to which to return. The result is that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent report in 2020 on 5-year-old preparedness for school and learning showed that U.S. children are significantly worse off than children in comparable countries such as England. U.S. children across the board show lower literacy and numeracy scores, poorer self-regulation, and less engagement in acts of cooperation, kindness, and other prosocial behaviors (Suskind & Denworth, p. 50). As a nation, we are quite literally leaving our children behind those in socio-economically equivalent societies.
However, let’s imagine for a moment that we have a magic wand, and suddenly, congress comes to its senses and passes a national parental leave law. Does it matter if it is unpaid or paid leave? The answer is “yes,” and recent research on paid parental leave has looked beyond simple economic impacts and has started examining its impact on the health of mothers and children. And—drum roll!—there are non-economic benefits: there is less postpartum depression, lower infant mortality, fewer rehospitalizations, and there is an increase in measures of infant attachment, more timely immunizations, and longer durations of breast feeding. Add dad into the paid leave equation, and it turns out divorce rates go down as well.
Furthermore, additional research has demonstrated a direct difference in brain development between infants whose parent(s) are on paid versus unpaid leave. For all children with parents on paid leave, their language skills are higher by age 2, and in situations where the parent has only a high school degree or less, paid leave leads to an improvement in emotional skills in their children that is absent in similarly educated parents on unpaid leave. What’s more, paid leave changes the actual patterns of brain activity, dramatically increasing in very young children the percentage of higher frequency brain waves associated with being better prepared later for success in school. Hence, what all this research indicates is “why paid leave at the birth of a child is consistent with policy centered on early brain development” (Suskind & Denworth, p. 52).
So why aren’t such policies in place? And why does paid leave make a material difference in infant development over unpaid leave given that both provide the extra interaction time so critical to language acquisition and emotional maturation?
I’m going to tackle the second question first because it helps us better understand the answer to the one about policy, since it turns out that both questions involve the impact of economic insecurity on families. Parents on unpaid leave, like those already living in poverty, have higher levels of cortisol—the stress hormone—than both the baseline level in the general population and in parents on paid leave. The supposition is that unpaid leave leads to concern and worry about the economic future, and this stress directly impacts that quality of parent-infant interactions—especially for those taking place in lower-income families, where job security is already often more tenuous. The bottom-line is that unpaid leave or no-leave-at-all both generate home environments with potentially toxic levels of stress, and “we know that very young children do best when they are protected from toxic stress and when their lives are stable and predictable” (Suskind & Denworth, p. 53).
Yet, if stable and predictable, low stress environments lay the foundation for healthy brain development in our children, why aren’t there policies in place to promote families having them? The truth is that there is one such policy in place and it is the federal child tax credit (and similar ones in certain states) for families with young children. A 2019 National Academy of Science report demonstrated that these tax credits have the most potential for generating family economic stability (and therefore lower cortisol levels in caregivers), and the full “benefits of these credits became clear during the pandemic, when a historic expanded tax credit brought about an immediate reduction in childhood poverty rates” (Suskind & Denworth, p. 53), easing the stress of the pandemic itself on families. In fact, the pandemic saw the lowest numbers of children experiencing poverty in over a generation; hence, as a society, we do already know what works to help provide a stable foundation for childhood development.
However, as columnist, David Brooks, points out, we are also a society deeply divided over its moral character, entrenched so intensely in either the progressive or conservative tradition that we seem no longer capable of acknowledge the flaws and weaknesses of both—nor the true need for both. Consequently, a closely divided U. S. Senate refused at the end of 2021 to extend the pandemic child tax credits that had made such a positive impact on family’s lives, and the result is that “the childhood poverty rate spiked from 12 to 17 percent higher than before the pandemic,” pushing an additional 3.7 million children who had not been before COVID arrived into poverty (Suskind & Denworth, p. 53).
To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of taking the entire population of the city of Chicago and suddenly making them poor. Worst, it’s our children we are talking about here! What kind of society does not do everything in its power that every other industrialized country on this planet does—from tax credits to paid paternal leave to universal, high-quality preschool—to provide the foundation for proper brain development?
Sadly, the answer that weaves its way into this tapestry can be found in the examples of Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, and the Texas State Board of Education. DeSantis is so determined to instill his own form of indoctrination to counter the realities that our nation was founded in significant part on slavery and that LGBTQ+ individuals possess moral dignity that should be honored that he is accelerating the teacher loss in a state that already has a shortage of more than 9,500 of them—including a school in Brevard county that has 20 openings in a total staff of 40. Meanwhile, the Texas State Board of Education, in revising the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Science K-12 Standards, allowed members of the Texas Energy Council to water-down (and even remove) references to the human responsibility for the climate change crisis to the point where all children now have to know about carbon is that the element has a natural biogeochemical cycle that it moves through over time.
What’s worse is that both these examples have the potential to have national impacts. DeSantis is considered a front-runner for the 2024 Republican nominee for president, with the potential support of a U.S. Supreme Court that apparently wants to make The Handmaid’s Tale the law of the land and the marriage of one of its own justices illegal. Add in Mitch McConnell as potential Senate President, and at least a century of growth in human rights are on the line—not least of which may be the right to fair, equitable, and honest public education.
But at least in the case of DeSantis, there has to be an election, and elections can be lost. Because of the size of Texas, it carries the economic weight of the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, and therefore, textbook publishers will write what Texas asks and so influence what’s actually commercially available for many of the other public schools in the nation. Of course:
Texas isn’t the only major buyer of textbooks. Other large states such as California have adopted standards that embrace the science of climate change, leading to a divide. Textbook publishers create one set of products to sell in Texas and states that lean the same way and a second set of products for states aligned with California. This poses an equity problem: the education a child receives on an issue central to the modern world depends on what state they happen to live in (Worth, p. 49), leading to the potential for even further political divide in this country.
I know, I know. Enough already. We all know (or at least have strong suspicions) that the world’s going to hell on a rocket; so get off my proverbial soap box about everything that’s wrong and be silent already—especially since it might appear that I’m starting to sound like I’m cursing the darkness rather than lighting candles against it.
Except, I’m not quite done weaving. There is one last thread to bring into this tapestry, and it starts with an alternative understanding of wisdom, different from what I think the role of wisdom is in education. Here, I want to investigate what is referred to as the “Wisdom Literature” or “Wisdom Tradition” within the Hebrew scriptures and what it might have to teach us about “living in a world going to hell on a rocket.”
First, I need to provide a brief lesson in Bible scholarship for the uninitiated. Unlike the Christian rendering of what they refer to as the Old Testament, the Jewish tradition does not combine all its scriptural passages into one single book. Nor does it give each collection of passages equal weight in terms of significance. Thus, there is The Torah, “The Five Books of Moses,” that is considered the most important of the scriptures and which religious scholar, Pete Enns likes to refer as the narrative, the story of how were supposed to live a faithful life. Then there are The Prophets, which Enns likens to the eternal reminders of ways in which we have not lived up to the “supposed.” And final, there are The Writings, a collection of books sometimes known as the Wisdom Literature, which Enns suggests serve the purpose of pointedly challenging that we basically never live up to the “supposed.”
Of The Writings, the two most pertinent to this discussion are perhaps the most familiar ones, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The former, of course, contains lots of concrete suggestions and pithy sayings on how to live the “supposed” successfully, and the latter—whose famous “there is a time” passage is a standard at funerals—basically declares: not only is the world going to hell on a rocket, but it has always gone to hell on a rocket, and it is always going to go to hell on a rocket; so make peace that you are on a rocket (I think the author of Ecclesiastes would have appreciated Burkeman’s basic position that the miracle is that you get to have a bad day in the first place).
What, though, do a book about how to make choices and a book that says all choices are pointless have to do with wisdom, let alone political divisions over policies about paid parental leave and effective infant brain development? The answer comes from Enns who points out that if you examine Proverbs closely, you discover that it is constantly telling the reader to “Do A” only to be immediately followed by “Don’t do A”—often in the exact same passage—and he suggests that this was a deliberate decision on the part of Hebrew scriptures editors, as was the decision to include the quite nihilistic sounding Ecclesiastes because, as he fleshes out in his conversation with Bass, when you examine everything that is written in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, you realize that the wisdom they are calling us to is the challenge of determining when “Do A” is the right choice while riding the rocket, and when “Don’t do A” is the right choice.
Or to put it in the language I used in A Modestly Meaningful Life, as you consume your oxygen and food and produce your carbon dioxide and urine—ultimately the only thing any of us ever do (Ecclesiastes’ point)—do these things thoughtfully, with considered reflection. Pay careful attention to the consumption and the production because, as Burkeman puts it, “life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, [therefore give] each one the time it requires (p. 181; original emphasis). The wisdom of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, Enns suggests, is that of course life is pointless but that what happens in life matters—what you do to yourself and others matters—because our experience of life is altered every time something transpires in it. Therefore, wisdom is our capacity to choose well between “Do A/Don’t do A” in a particular situation.
Which brings me full circle, with my final weft to complete this tapestry. A choice confronting us as a nation is clear: “healthy brain maturation represents the foundation of our country because it represents our future. That means there is nothing more important we can do as a society than foster and protect the brain development of our children” (Suskind & Denworth, p. 53). And the research is equally clear: paid parental leave maximizes language development and emotional response in infants and toddlers, the two most critical skills for success in formal schooling—where one might hope such well-developed brains could resist indoctrination into white privilege and climate crisis denial.
Thus, we have an opportunity for wisdom, both as individuals and as a larger society, and my question for all of us is: what are we going to do with this opportunity? We know what is best for our children, and we know it is ultimately best for our own future (they are, after all, going to be responsible for taking care of us one day!). So whether it is working within a single company as employee or boss to change policy or voting and lobbying at some level of government to change policy, each of us has the power to employ our wisdom on what happens to our kids.
Because while there really is nothing new under the sun and all is ultimately vanity, what happens does matter—to them; to all of us. That’s the paradox: life is both meaningless and meaningful, and it is in the tension of that paradox that we must prepare our children to live out their best possible lives. Hopefully, we are all up to the challenge.
References
Allen, G. (July 13, 2022) Florida Gov. DeSantis Takes Aim at What He Sees as Indoctrination in Schools. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1110842453/florida-gov-desantis-is-doing-battle-against-woke-public-schools.
Bass, D. (July 12, 2022) Pete Enns on Wisdom. The Cottage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctCttCt3pg4.
Bass, D. (July 12, 2022) Summer Wisdom Journey: Ecclesiastes—Delight and Despair. The Cottage. https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/summer-wisdom-journey-ecclesiastes?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=emailhttps://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/summer-wisdom-journey-ecclesiastes?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
Brooks, D. (May 19, 2022) How Democrats Can Win the Morality Wars. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/democrats-morality-wars.html.
Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
May, K. (2020) Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. New York: Riverhead Books.
Suskind, D. & Denworth, L. (June 2022) The Path to Better Childhoods. Scientific American. Pp. 48-53.
Worth, K. (July 2022) Climate Miseducation: How Oil and Gas Representatives Manipulate the Standards for Courses and Textbooks from Kindergarten to 12th Grade. Scientific American. Pp. 42-49.
Light a Candle 