In 1985, Robert Bellah and his colleagues published a groundbreaking sociological analysis of the role that individualism plays in American culture.  Called Habits of the Heart, its analysis was so significant and insightful that 35 years later, the book is still in print, still required reading in most sociology programs, and still often compared to de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America for its evaluation of the benefits and threats that individualism presents for and to our society.

I share all this because as I have been watching the pandemic unfold and listening most recently to the debate and arguments over whether or how to reopen our schools this fall, I have been reminded of Bellah, et al’s work, and in revisiting it, I realized it has a lot of bearing on the current situation in which we find ourselves.  What’s more, I think it has important and timely lessons to teach to those of us willing to listen and learn, and so if the reader will indulge, I want first to provide a summary of Bellah and his colleagues’ original analysis for anyone not familiar with it and then present the lessons I think it has for the current debate about school opening.

Bellah and his team start their examination of individualism in America by identifying the type they found most prevalent in their research:  an idea they called “ontological individualism.”  It is, they argue, the notion that only the individual person is real and can have actual being through his/her/their unique thoughts and experiences and that, therefore, any truth-claims can only be those of the individual:  what is true is what I think is true. 

Yet, such an understanding of individualism, they proceed to point out, has profound consequences for the communal nature of our society.  For starters, it reduces even our most deeply held ethical virtues and values to mere personal preferences.  That, in turn, leaves us with the inability to make legitimate demands on others because “in a world of potentially conflicting self-interests, no one can really say that one value system is better than another” (p. 7).  In other words, where every individual’s truth is real and therefore just as valid as every other individual’s truth, we have no justification for obligating someone else to behave in a certain way.  Moreover, because we cannot justify obligations on others, we have no grounds for forging the kinds of civic attachments that might impinge on the personal freedom to create the self of one’s choice—precisely the kinds of civic attachments needed to form a just society.  Therefore, Bellah, et al contend, the dominant form of individualism practiced in this country undermines the very moral reasoning needed for creating our society in the first place.

And the consequences of this fact, documented in their research, are significant, momentous, and potentially threatening to our future well-being.  First, having lost the language to speak of substantive common goals that transcend individual wants and needs, we have divided ourselves into like-minded groups of individuals who share only our attitudes, beliefs, economic status, and/or lifestyles—a division which the technological revolution of the past 35 years as only amplified as we sit staring at our screens, siloed in our own little narcissistic bubbles of distraction.  Second, without a common understanding of moral character and what civic virtue is, we have a harder and harder time seeing these things in others who are not fellow members of our group—resulting over the past 35 years in the increasingly bitter and ever more dysfunctional partisanship of our public domain.  Third, when any sense of “should” is defined only by someone’s personal values, people become only as valuable to one another as their ability to meet each other’s wants and needs.  Meaning that when they can no longer do so, there is no obligation to maintain the relationship, and “love-thy-neighbor” degenerates into “love those compatible neighbors they have surrounded themselves with…while letting the rest of the world go its chaotic, mysterious way” (p. 179).

Which is exactly the situation we find ourselves in today—with the emphasis on “chaotic.”  Instead of organizing daily life for civic well-being where we are called to contribute through our individual behaviors to binding us together for a greater good, we have organized our society purely for private achievement (as social media expert Ana Homayoun says, it’s all about the “likes”) and individual consumption (think Amazon and Netflix).  Gone is any notion that a good citizen is someone who understands that personal welfare depends on the general welfare and acts accordingly—you have only to witness the politicization of wearing facemasks in the midst of a public health crisis to see what I mean—and thus, as Bellah, et al challenged 35 years ago, the question confronting us today is whether a society with “an individualism in which the self has become the main form of reality” (p. 143) can in fact survive.

The simple truth is that we have shattered society into almost as many special interests as there are individuals, and as a consequence, “we have committed what to the republican founders of our nation was the cardinal sin:  we have put our own good as individuals, as groups, as a nation, ahead of the common good” (p. 285).  Furthermore, we find it nearly impossible to confess and save ourselves from this sin because “the language of individualism, the primary American language of self-understanding, limits the ways in which people think” (p. 290).  We have formed mental habits that presume our individual destinies are entirely in our own hands, and as a consequence, we implicitly dismiss all the relationships that actually make our lives even possible, denying that we are, in fact, fundamentally and utterly co-dependent on one another for our individual as well as collective survival and well-being.

It is this latter denial (which I have written more about elsewhere) that is the root cause of why we are struggling so hard right now with the decision about re-opening schools.  We have no way to discuss what is the common good because too many of us are simply concerned with “what’s good for me and mine?” Thus, when we find ourselves (as we presently do) forced to decide between competing common goods by the reality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus—e.g. the quality of our children’s futures and their collective mental health versus the prevention of an increased spread of COVID-19 among the most vulnerable—we do not possess a united understanding of what is best for the overall public welfare and future of our society to address the problem.  Where we need a choir, we have cacophony, and without a united voice, we will continue as a country to bungle every aspect of this pandemic—including its impact on schools—as badly as we have to date.  As the old Pogo cartoon once said, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Interestingly enough, Bellah, et al would go on to write a follow up to Habits of the Heart where they presented the argument for how Americans might transform our almost systemically narcissist individualism with its many problems into a more republican individualism with its benefits of personal freedom not found at the expense of the common good.  Entitled The Good Society, they conclude this book with a chapter called “Democracy Means Paying Attention”—as in paying attention to those who are different from us; paying attention to the quality of our social safety-net; paying attention to the social injustices right there in front of our faces; paying attention (as I have argued throughout this project) to how we educate our children; paying attention to….

The list could go on, but right now, too many of us are only paying attention to a mirror, and unless we start truly paying attention to the character of the web of relationships of which we are a part, then I fear the original words of Bellah and his colleagues in may be more than predictive; they may become prophetic:

We have never before faced a situation that called our deepest assumptions so radically into question.  Our problems today are not just political.  We have assumed that as long as economic growth continued, we could leave all else to the private sphere.  Now that economic growth is faltering and the moral ecology on which we have tacitly depended is in disarray, we are beginning to understand that our common life requires more [of each of us]… and if [individual] power is our only end, the death in question may not be merely personal, but civilizational (p. 295). 

References

Bellah, R., et al. (1991) The Good Society.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf.

Bellah, R., et al. (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, Ltd.

Homayoun, A. (2018) Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World.  Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.

To redesign social systems, we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.
—Peggy McIntosh

If the parents of black children must have these terrible conversations,
so must the parents of white children. We must teach them to use their voice for good,
not to be apathetic, not to overlook what is right in front of them.
—Rev. Georgi Funderburk

If you are remaining silent, you are being complicit.
—Anonymous

The events of the past weeks surrounding the murder of George Floyd have generated an opening for change not seen in nearly 60 years, and it is long past time that those of us who are part of the dominant White power structure in this country recognize that the people who need to change are, in fact, us.  As White citizens, we are the main source of the racism baked into nearly every fiber of our social fabric, and I was reminded of just how “baked in” it is during a recent conversation with a good friend.  An average White, socially egalitarian liberal, she was venting her rage at the images of the peaceful protestors being teargassed to make way for President Trump’s now infamous photo-op outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, and she kept repeating “Isn’t the motto of the police ‘To Protect and To Serve’?” To which I finally replied, “To protect and to serve who? You’re not finishing the sentence: the always unspoken part of that motto is ‘To Protect and To Serve White people.’  The police don’t really exist to protect everyone; they exist to keep the current socio-economic system in this country safe and secure for folks like us.”

Now, in fairness to my friend, that piece of hidden White privilege was not always something I recognized either, and it was only through training in diversity, equity, and inclusion issues (DEI) that I learned the historical role of policing in this country for myself.  What’s more, as a fellow White, socially egalitarian liberal, it was not easy or pleasant to confront the truth.  But Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad summarizes the situation well when he bluntly points out that “the function of police are to control essential workers…ensuring that these out-groups [have] minimal freedom beyond what [is] required for them to do their jobs” (Throughline), and as a White American, I first have to recognize my role in that system every time Amazon drops off a package at my door.  Then, second, I need to be figuring out what I can be doing to change it.  As Muhammad asks, again bluntly, “Do white people in America still want the police to protect their interests over the rights and dignity and lives of black and in too many cases brown, Indigenous and Asian populations in this country?” (Throughline) Or do we want to change things in this country so that Black lives (along with the lives of all the other people of color) matter as much as White lives do?

That is why the current opportunity is about so much more than confronting the problem of police brutality.  It is about the entire spectrum of social brutality generated by this country’s systemic racism.  The harsh reality is that “relative to White Americans, Black Americans experience disadvantages—meaning inferior outcomes—on almost every economically significant dimension.  This includes earnings, education, housing, employment, status in the criminal justice system, and health” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 190).  Furthermore, this disadvantage is found at every level of economic class.  Even wealthy African Americans have statistically shorter lifespans and are just as likely to be pulled over while driving as those with less economic means.  The frank and brutal truth is that it is hazardous to be Black in this country.

Which is sin at the most biblical understanding of that word! What’s more, the change to correct it is shamefully overdue, and the simple truth is that the only way we stop this social injustice is to start dismantling the White privilege that produces it!

But to dismantle something, you first have to understand it, and “many scientists now believe that, rather than disappearing, Americans’ race prejudices have merely metamorphosed into harder to see forms” and that “the stronger portion of the hidden undercurrent of biases consists of those that remain outwardly unexpressed for the simple reason that their possessors are unaware of possessing them” (Banaji & Greenwald, pp. 170 & 187).  Psychologist call these hidden, unconscious forms of racial prejudice, “implicit biases,” and we must understand them, why we have them, and what their impact is on our existing social order if we are to have any hope of deconstructing the White privilege at the root of our society’s racism.  I have written briefly elsewhere about this topic, but it is time for a deeper dive.

The Science of Unfairness

It all starts with the fact that the brain “does a great deal of its work automatically, unconsciously, and unintentionally” (Banaji & Greenwald, pp. 5-6).  Indeed, “great deal” may not adequately capture the amount of brain activity we are never consciously aware of due to the brain’s built-in filtering systems.  For example, your heart is actively beating right now, and your GI tract is busy wriggling like a worm on a hook.  Yet your brainstem controlling these actions only lets signals through to the self-awareness circuits when something, such as a racing heart or intestinal cramping, requires more deliberate attention.  Likewise, centers in your thalamus are currently busily processing the pressure on your skin from the air and your clothes (as well as the temperature and humidity).  Yet you only become aware of this data when, for instance, a change in pressure alerts you to a breeze or someone tugging on your shirt.  The brain filters this enormous amount of information because if you had to be self-aware of every heartbeat, touch of clothing, or other continuous stimuli the brain is processing 24/7 to keep you alive, the self-aware part of your brain couldn’t function.

But it isn’t just filtering that the brain does “automatically, unconsciously, and unintentionally.” The brain generates many of our behaviors this way as well.  At the most basic level, this can be something as simple as tying one’s shoes in the morning while actively thinking about the days upcoming events.  Or it can be a more complex behavior such as the commute home, listening or singing along to the radio, and suddenly realizing you are in your driveway.

At their most complex levels, though, these auto-behaviors can have dramatic consequences.  The example I always give my students is the first-day-at-a-new-school moment (or any similar situation).  I’ve taught them about the three survival questions the brain’s limbic structures ask every waking second:  Is it dangerous? Can I eat it? Can I mate with it? And then I point out to them that in that room full of new, totally unknown people, they walked up to some individual or small group of people in the room first.  So why those and not others? Answer: parts of their thalamus had decided these people were either safe or could protect me, could help me get food, and/or could somehow improve my reproductive chances.  What’s more, all of it done without a single conscious, deliberate thought:  life-long friendships and future marriages the possible consequences of a quick limbic scan of a room.

The result of all this autopiloting for the current discussion is that the brain’s buried thoughts where we have no self-reflective awareness (such as the three limbic questions) can be at total, even antagonistic odds with those intentional thoughts where we are self-aware. It is these deeper, “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 4), and a good example is the utter unreliability of eyewitnesses. Simply change how a witness to a crash is asked about it—“hit” vs. “smash into”—and you will alter an individual’s description of the damage caused.  Furthermore, there is the tendency to generate false memories in certain situations; so, for instance, throw a picnic for someone and then later ask about “the blue cooler” (which the researcher deliberately made sure was never there), and the respondent will argue to the grave about “remembering” the presence of said cooler—simply because the brain has been trained through experience to associate coolers with picnics (it’s known in psychology as “availability bias”).  The bottom line is “that experts agree that the ability to have conscious access to our minds is quite low” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 61), and the consequence is that each and every one of us have some potentially pretty nasty stuff operating in our heads that we don’t even realize is there guiding our behaviors and influencing our decisions.

One such “nasty” is the bias of stereotyping, which as I discussed in Chapter 8, our brain’s do instinctively.  In fact, “it is not possible to be human and to avoid making the use of stereotypes” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 91) because we are hard-wired to categorize any and all sensory input, and we do most of it unconsciously.  The ancestral brain that automatically categorized “tan with dark spots=danger” survived the leopard to produce offspring, and that is probably why “stereotypes are usually not favorable” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 77):  our brains employed them to keep us safe from danger (or perceived danger) while evolving on the Savannah.

But we don’t live in that environment anymore, and today, it is our culture that shapes this automatic stereotyping process, starting at a far earlier age than I suspect most of us realize.  Research shows that “by three months of age [infants] stare longer at a face from their own racial group than at one from a less familiar racial group,” something they do not do at birth.  Hence, “it is clear that they acquire the preference, but they do so quite quickly after birth” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 128).  Furthermore, by the time these infants have become toddlers, research shows they are actively using various cultural cues to categorize the world into “us” and “them.”  Indeed, each of our brains is SO hard-wired for this process that you can:

create an arbitrary connection between a person and a group and provide the mere suggestion that there are others who lack this connection to self, and the psychology of ‘us’ and ‘them’ rushes in to fill the void.  Lines are drawn, whether or not the basis for the groups makes any sense, and discrimination follows (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 136).

Thus, the bottom line (and to put it bluntly) is that each of us stereotype groups of people using the input from our culture, we do so all the time, and there is not a single one of us without these biases buried deep within our unconscious minds.  Perhaps even worse, these buried biases can join the limbic system’s three silent questions to guide us to unconsciously identify what is safe, nourishing, and mate-worthy with only our own racial or ethnic group, helping to perpetuate the separations in our culture that are shaping our stereotypes in the first place.  We are simply stuck with a brain wired for prejudice, and we have to acknowledge and accept this scientific reality before we can successfully engage in the deliberate, self-reflective work to combat it.

Racism and the Myth of the Unbiased Person

I can share from observed experience that what I am about to state all too often causes White people—especially my fellow socially egalitarian liberals—to shut down and stop listening (or in this case, reading) in a mixture of denial and guilt.  But what the science above shows irrefutably is that if you are a White person in our culture, you are by definition racist because it is not possible for you not to have buried stereotypes in your brain that unconsciously guide your behavior to maintain your White privilege.  That is simply how the brain’s genetically programmed hard-wiring is going to cause a brain raised in this culture to work, and it is, in fact, worth quoting Banaji & Greenwald extensively at this point because while:

many Americans who express egalitarian views in public continue to quietly harbor, in private, racial biases that remain potent sources of discrimination…there now exists a substantial body of evidence that automatic White preference—as measured by the Race IAT (Implicit Association Test)—predicts discriminatory behavior even among people who fervently espouse egalitarian views.  This evidence is far too substantial to ignore, and indeed, it has continued to accumulate steadily. [Furthermore,] there is well-documented evidence of widespread acts of discrimination against Black Americans that have put them at a disadvantage in just about every economically significant domain of life.  [Hence,] it is reasonable to conclude not only that implicit bias is a cause of Black disadvantage but also that it plausibly plays a greater role than does explicit bias in explaining the discrimination that contributes to Black disadvantage.  Implicit bias may operate outside of awareness, hidden from those who have it, but the discrimination that it produces can be clearly visible to researchers, and almost certainly also clearly visible to those who are disadvantaged by it (pp. 178 & 209).

So now that we all know the foundational truth about racism in this country, I want to return to that “mixture of denial and guilt.”  Too often, I have witnessed many of my fellow White colleagues, when confronted for the first time with this fact about their own racism, reply “but how can I be a racist? I’m a good person; I treat everyone equally.”  It is the most common form of denial I have seen, and what I want to challenge (and have in personal exchanges) is that what is at issue is not an individual’s moral character in how he, she, or they consciously interact with others (though it obviously is for overt racists).  What awareness of my racism means is that I now understand there is no such things as an unbiased person, including myself, and that the task for me as a so-called “good person” is to become an anti-racist, to learn and discover my own hidden biases so that I can fight them as deliberately as possible in my decisions and my behaviors.  That’s the power of this truth for those of us who are White in this society.

Furthermore, I have always liked what my school’s former DEI Director, Marlo Thomas, had to say in response to the guilt many White people feel when they first learn the truth about their racism (and I’m paraphrasing):  it’s a useless emotional response.  You did not choose to be born a White person in this country; therefore, it’s not like your racism was a deliberate moral choice you made.  But now that you do know the truth, any future complicity is on you. So get on with the work you need to be doing to unpack all that White privilege! A task to which I will now turn.

Advantage in a World of Finite Resources

Setting aside the delusions of the capitalist belief in perpetual exponential growth, the reality is that our planet is a closed system, and that means the amount of resources in this world are finite.  Once the last atom of iron ore or gold or any other resource is extracted from the ground, there isn’t any more to extract (though what is finite can be recycled!), and as I pointed out in “COVID-19, Climate Change, and Other Inconvenient Truths,” just because we may not like the limitations reality puts on us doesn’t make them any less true or impactful.

I share this seemingly self-evident truth about our world’s finite resources because the foundation of the systemic racism in this country is the inequitable distribution of resources possessed and available to those of us who are White.  Any material advantage possessed by one group can only come at the expense of lessoning the amount of resources available to another group when there is a limit to said resources, and therefore, the socio-economic advantages of White Americans must come at the expense of the disadvantages this causes people of color, especially Black Americans.  Furthermore, the extra resources advantage brings makes it possible to construct systems of power to ensure the continuation of that advantage, and you get our systemic racism.

What this all has to do with the concept of White privilege is that the truth of what I have just described is so hidden in the unconscious minds of most White Americans that getting them to see it, let alone accept it, is often like trying to get a fish to understand water.  Indeed, Peggy McIntosh in her now famous essay makes the observation that “as a white person, I realized that I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage” (p. 1; my emphasis).  White Americans are socialized from birth to believe that their advantage is simply like the air they breathe, a natural part of the environment, and so powerful and deeply rooted is this implicit bias that—to paraphrase McIntosh—denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages Whites gain from the disadvantages of those with darker skins:  the myth of meritocracy must be maintained at all cost because otherwise those of us who are White might actually have to—insert gasp!—give up some of our privilege.

Imagine, for example, if the predominately White CEOs and other leaders of corporate America suddenly owned the fact that their extreme wealth comes from extremely underpaying their so-called “essential” workers? They might then have to take a little less of that wealth for themselves and give it to their workers in the form of a livable wage. Or imagine if our mostly White political legislatures and executive branches had to embrace the truth about the real source of their power? They might then have to make fair election laws, properly fund education, provide an adequate social safety net, create appropriate tax codes, and engage in other acts of social justice that would enable all Americans to thrive.  Even at the level of the individual, imagine learning that your absolutely favorite restaurant engages in discriminatory hiring practices, what do you do?

The simple truth is that when those of us who are White have to start owning, confronting, and unpacking our privileged position in American society, we are faced with the truth that I first started exploring in “Maybe It’s Pie After All” that we might need to totally change how we understand how our culture works, it’s priorities, and our role in it.  Assumptions such as my friend’s about “to protect and to serve” have to be challenged by “to protect and to serve who?” The perhaps well-meaning but cluelessly hurtful White people who claim “I don’t see color” must learn to see this untruth for what it is and what it says about their default bias about their own skin color.  The White supporters in the recent protests need to understand how their privilege gives them something their fellow Black protestors simply do not have at the march’s end:  the luxury to go home and stop thinking about the situation for a while—as well as the fact that it doesn’t even need to cross their minds to worry about being pulled over merely for the color of their skin as they drive back home from the march.

I could continue, probably nearly indefinitely.  But my intent at this stage is to incentivize my White readers to start creating their own list of unrecognized privilege and hidden assumptions—to realize, for instance, that they can shop in any store they wish without any concern of being shadowed by a clerk, that even the poorest among them will receive better medical care in an emergency room, that they are guaranteed to turn on the television or stream a movie and see people who look like them, that….  Again, I could go on; instead, I challenge my readers who are White to reflect deeply and critically in order to generate their own list.  And if that feels overwhelming or nearly impossible initially, I encourage them to read McIntosh’s list of 50 items and, at the very least, see if they can’t add to it. 

I know it is not easy work to do, owning my racism, wrestling to unpack my White privilege in order to become a better anti-racist, and even though I have been pursuing DEI work for decades now, I still have my blind-spot moments that slap me in the face.  Just two years ago, for example, while having drinks with a friend, she asked me to order another round as she headed to the bathroom, and at a nearby table, a young waitress who was Black was clearly engaged in taking two women’s drink orders.  Without any conscious thought whatsoever, I raised my hand and all but snapped my fingers at the waitress to get her attention, clearly interrupting her taking the others’ orders, and the moment I did it the conscious thought hit me:  OMG! Could I have behaved any more like an entitled White male than I just did? I had managed to be both racist and sexist, all in the unthinking flick of a wrist! I apologized profusely to the waitress when she did eventually come to take our order, but it was a deeply humbling reminder of just how powerful those unconscious predispositions can be—even when you’re deliberately working at disabling them.

Educating for a Better Tomorrow

Yet disable them we must if we are to have any hope for eventually achieving a just and equitable society, and for those of us in education, that starts at the bare minimum with each of us as individuals.  I have written about the issue of bias in schools before, but I think every teacher at every grade-level should be required at the very least to take all the race and gender Implicit Association Tests before being allowed in the classroom. I would even go so far as to argue that completion of these tests should be a condition of licensure and that Schools of Education should require a course in implicit bias as a graduation requirement.  People are not always going to like everything they learn about themselves, but as educators, we need to know what’s lurking in the dark corners of our mind if we are to actively counteract them in our work with children.

That’s because there is evidence that our unconscious predispositions and hidden biases—and more importantly, those of our students—can be deliberately weakened.  Research has shown that something as simple as an imaging exercise (e.g. imagining the properties and characteristics of a strong and successful woman) can decrease the amount of bias (in this case, toward women) as measured on an Implicit Association Test.  Thus, it is critical to know our own biases so that we can take conscious steps to weaken them in ourselves, and it is critical to know the many types of hidden biases there are so that we can help our students weaken theirs.

Educators also need to be well-versed in the nature and types of microaggressions that can be both intentionally and unintentionally targeted at various groups of students.  These seemingly “sticks and stones” moments, such as commenting on a hairstyle, may not seem like much in the moment.  But the research shows that “many minor acts of discrimination can produce effects that are likewise too small to be noticed when they occur but which, if repeated many times, can accumulate in much the same way—only with negative effects, exacting a serious toll on the targets of discrimination” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 203) as the repeated spikes in cortisol keep the brain in a perpetual state of stress, with all the ill-health consequences that come with that.  Therefore, knowledge and mindfulness of microaggressions is a critical part of any teacher’s anti-racism tool kit.

Yet, as I state above, self-knowledge about one’s own biases and the many forms of subtle discrimination are the bare minimum for which those of us in education should be striving.  It is a no-brainer and, frankly, low-hanging fruit that our curricula should include authors of color in literature classes, children’s books with characters of color in elementary schools, and accurate and honest histories of racism in this country (I should not be 56 before learning of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre for the first time!).  Inclusion of traditionally excluded narratives in the content of our courses is unquestionably a first and necessary step toward fighting the implicit biases that harm our society.  But I would argue that doing so is not sufficient to alter the social structures in this country that determine who has advantage and who does not.

No, I think the only way we change the “have/have-not” situation that aligns along racial lines in this country is to make the deliberate decision to actively teach about White privilege.  And not just in the obvious history and literature classes.  For example, teaching in a health class that:

Black American and other minority groups [suffer] health care disparities that [result] in their receiving less effective medical care than [do] White Americans…even when minority and White patients [are] matched on socioeconomic status and when they [are] known to have the same insurance coverage (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 197).

Then explaining to that same class that as a result, a White American with diabetes will receive the earlier diagnosis and more vigilant preventative care needed to avoid the limb amputations that a Black American with diabetes is far more likely to suffer.  Or perhaps in a math class, students could learn the necessary algebra to calculate the difference in lifetime income between a White taxi driver or waiter and a Black taxi driver or waiter, given that the White taxi driver will receive 33% more in tips with each ride and the White waiter will receive 18% more with each customer.  Then teach them that this is true even when the individual receiving these services is a Black American; that’s how prevalent the White preference bias is in our culture!            

But whether it is these examples or others like them, the simple truth is that it is time we intentionally teach all our children about the unspoken White privilege that permeates our entire society so that everyone can see it for what it is.  Then and only then do I think we have a chance of achieving true racial and socio-economic justice in this land.

Coda

The journey I am promoting is long and never easy, and as McIntosh points out, “the pressure to avoid it is great” (p. 5).  Yet that pressure is not insurmountable if we understand from where it is coming, and for many if not most of my fellow White Americans—what Banaji and Greenwald call “the uncomfortable egalitarians”—this pressure comes, I think, from an error in mindset, the habit of thinking about everything as if it were “either-or.”  For example, the shoe fits or it doesn’t.  Abortion is right or it’s wrong.  You’re a good person or you’re not.  I am a racist or I’m not one.

This kind of binary thinking has its place and has proven enormously useful in science and other analytic fields.  But as that last statement suggests, “either-or” isn’t very helpful when it comes to understanding and overcoming racism because the moment we employ this kind of thinking, it threatens to derail the kind of personal and institutional work I am promoting with regard to unpacking White privilege.  And it does so because today’s society generally agrees that racism is bad, and therefore, the logic of either-or thinking plays out that if I as a White person don’t automatically deny my innate racism, I am bad by definition because I can only be one thing or another; I want to think of myself as a good person…. You get the picture of where the White denial is coming.

Yet as Parker Palmer wisely reminds us, “in certain circumstances, truth is found not by splitting the world into either-ors but by embracing it as both-and.  In certain circumstances, truth is a paradoxical joining of apparent opposites, and if we want to know that truth, we must learn to embrace those opposites as one” (pp. 62-63).  Racism is such a truth, and it is only by embracing that I, as a White person in this country, can be both a racist and an anti-racist that I can become the ally to people of color I am striving to be.  It is only by understanding that both my unconscious thoughts and my conscious thoughts guide my behavior that I can make the deliberate choices needed to dismantle the systems of privilege that give me an advantage at the expense of the disadvantage of others. Thus, it is only by recognizing the paradoxical character of my racism that I can strive to become the good person I want to be. 

Again, the journey is long and never easy, and I struggle with it as much as anyone.  But I need to work each day to unearth my implicit biases and unpack my hidden privilege, and my charge to my White readers not already intentionally on this journey is this:  join those of us who are and become someone who is both a racist and an anti-racist.  Because until you do, any real or lasting change will remain no more than a wishful dream.

References

Author’s Note: While I have quoted exclusively from the work of Mahazrin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald about how the brain generates implicit bias, I have done so only because of the accessibilty of their language. For those seeking a deeper dive into the brain science behind how the unconscious mind works, I have provided the additional references that have informed the material presented here.

Banaji, M. & Greenwald, A. (2013) Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.  New York: Bantham Books.

Battro, A. (2000) Half a Brain Is Enough: The Story of Nico (Cambridge Studies in Cognitive and Perceptual Development).  Cambridge: The University Press.

Feinberg, J. (2001) Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kotlowitz, A. (1992) There are No Children Here. New York: Anchor Books.

McIntosh, P. (1989) White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Peace and Freedom Magazine (July/August). Downloaded at https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf.

Medina, J. (2014) Brain Rules.  Seattle:  Pear Press.

NPR’s Throughline (June 4, 2020) American Police. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/869046127.

Palmer, P. (1998) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Ramachandran, V.S. & Blakeslee, S. (1998) Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.  New York: William Morrow.

Tatum, B.D. (1997) Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? New York:  Basic Books.

Grading still remains an aspect of school
that is clothed in myth, mystery, and magic.
—Ken O’Connor

If we’re grading now, we’re grading privilege.
—Sheldon Eakins

One of my regular readers happens to be a close personal friend whose daughter was in the inaugural class of the STEM Institute I helped found, and so it was with great parental pride that she recently shared with me the virtual presentation her daughter had to give in order to fulfill the final requirements for earning her degree in engineering this past month at Villanova.  It was professional, well-executed, articulate…and by the time I was done watching it, what struck me most was the thought:  how could a professor possibly assign this a grade? Short of missing actual content that I don’t have the expertise to know about, my friend’s daughter and her colleagues had clearly demonstrated that they knew how to design the specifications for constructing the assigned building, and having demonstrated this mastery, how could grading it be meaningful? Mastery is mastery; does it even make sense to speak of an “A-” or “B+” level when it comes to mastery? Hadn’t what I had just watched made the concept of an “A” effectively meaningless?

These are the sorts of questions that got me thinking, and it made me realize that just as I had not addressed my thoughts about the ultimate purpose of education in the main chapters of this project (see my post “Cultivating Wisdom”), I likewise have never really discussed the topic of grading—which feels embarrassingly negligent given the centrality grades and the act of grading have in our educational systems (as well as how problematic assessment of any kind has been during the pandemic).  Thus, I think it’s time to explore what it means to grade the learning process, to ask ourselves whether that is even a meaningful idea in the first place and, if it is, to examine what authentically engaged grading might look like.

Grading’s Traditional Purpose

To understand why grades and grading have been a long-standing part of the teaching and learning process, we must first recognize the historical role that schools and education have played in maintaining and stabilizing the status quo of pre-existing socio-economic structures.  All societys have a variety of social and economic roles in their “opportunity structures” that require filling and that we must socialize individuals to do if that society is to function at all.  Furthermore, “it follows [logically] that some individuals must be socialized to occupy high-status positions, while others must be socialized or adapted to fill low-status positions” (Spener, p. 61), and that means every society needs a mechanism for achieving this end, a mechanism that is almost always controlled by those privileged in that society in order to preserve said privilege.

In the Industrial world, schools became this mechanism.  In the move away from the agrarian 19^th Century individuated one-room model for educating people to the modern assembly-line approach, schools became the dominant tool for sorting people into their socio-economic roles through academic tracking mechanisms, gateway testing, and various other methods for assigning status identity.  Basically, you went to school to be told (more or less) who you were going to be as an adult, and we still use schools for this purpose to this day. 

I say “more or less” because there are always cracks in every system that isolated individuals manage to squeeze through.  But the overwhelming data shows that your socio-economic status at birth is likely to predict your socio-economic status in adulthood, and in some societies, the sorting and socializing schools do to achieve this has an almost caste-like quality to it.  I will never forget the look of surprise on my Japanese colleagues in Tokyo when they learned that their American counterparts in the exchange had chosen to be teachers.  Asked about their surprise, they simply informed us that the educational system had identified them as most appropriate for fulfilling the role of teacher and so that is what they had become.

However, regardless of how tightly or loosely schools socialize children for their eventual place in the “opportunity structure,” any such sorting requires that “the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and personal attributes that determine a low-status position in society must be differentiated from those suitable for a high-status position” (Spener, p. 61), and that’s where grading comes into the picture.  As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the status quo needs a method for assigning value to individual people in order to preserve itself, and what better way to do that than using grades to rank everyone on the basis of what Ted Dintersmith argues are “inconsequential proficiencies, in ways that provide outsized advantage to the affluent” (p. 126).  Yet even within a given status level, high or low, grading is still used to rank potential even further, and that is why behavioral metrics such as completing homework, class participation, attendance, cheating, etc. are regularly folded into grades when they have absolutely nothing to do with the degree of mastery of a child’s learning—allegedly what the grading is supposed to be determining in the first place.

The bottom line is that grading as it is has regularly been employed in schools is about social engineering, not teaching and learning, and in fact, as Ken O’Connor and Kara Newhouse point out, the vast majority of grading practices actually harm the educational process.  They are susceptible to implicit biases.  They cannot accurately reflect comparisons of student learning due to disparities in student resources.  They lack precision and consistency because any two teachers could have entirely different grading policies for the exact same course.  They serve as extrinsic motivators at best, with the consequent disengagement from the learning process that comes with that, and they encourage the kind of mediocre thinking and cookbook curricula that are easy and cheap to test and measure.  In short, grading as commonly practiced inhibits good teaching and learning.

Authentically Engaged Grading

But what if grading wasn’t about social engineering? What if it was part of the learning process instead? What if, as educational reformer O’Connor puts it, grading’s “primary purpose [is] communication about achievement” (p. 7) with respect to mastery of a given skill, topic, or discipline? What if we graded to help students acquire that mastery?

O’Connor himself defines “achievement” as how students perform on summative assessments measured according to published standards and learning outcomes.  He believes that only this understanding of learning success will produce grades that are accurate, meaningful, consistent and can support learning. 

However, while I like the precision of O’Connor’s views, I think his understanding of how to measure academic achievement still risks trapping us in the current status quo of Dintersmith’s “inconsequential proficiencies” and low-tier standards that are readily measured using multiple choice assessments.  What children learn “should not be determined by how easy or difficult various outcomes are to measure” (Fadel, et al, p. 104), and it is too easy to use O’Connor’s understanding of grading to measure mastery of data and information rather than mastery of understanding and expertise.  As Dintersmith demands, “our children should study what’s important to learn, not what’s easy for you to test” (p. xix), and as Fadel, et al argue, much of what is important to learn are character qualities such as empathy and cognitive abilities such as meta-learning, none of which lend themselves readily to measurement.

How, then, do we grade the kind of deeper learning that I and my fellow educational reform advocates such as Dintersmith and Fadel (and even O’Connor) are arguing is vital for our society’s future? How does an authentically engaged educator understand the grading process and its purpose?  The answer, I think, lies in how such teachers understand the teaching and learning process in the first place.  If good teaching (as I have argued in Chapter 4) is about creating and modeling the conditions for students to “do” what they are learning and good learning (as I have argued in Chapter 5) is about mastering this “doing,” then grading becomes part of the instructional process itself, an on-going feedback to each child of how close they have gotten to mastery of what they are studying.

When you grade this way, though, you collapse the traditional distinction between formative and summative assessment.  We usually think of formative assessments as tools for monitoring student progress; while summative assessments are final reports on what a child has learned.  But when grading becomes part of the instructional process, each formative assessment has to be treated “as if” it were summative so that the student knows how close or far away from mastery she, he, or they currently are.  And each summative assessment has to be treated “as if” it were formative so that students maintain the growth mindset that grasps that true mastery of anything is never fully accomplished, that there is always room to grow.

To illustrate what I mean allow me to share some practices from my own classroom, where it is a mantra from the very first day of class that “we learn from our mistakes.”  First, I regularly “flip” the traditional role of homework, doing the actual active practice of new material during class time when I can be present to coach and guide my students’ learning, making the homework, then, a small-scale graded assessment for them to show me how well they mastered the day’s work.  Second, I provide the opportunity for my students to correct all graded assessments—from the homework ones to the big unit tests—in order to have them revisit the material and enable them to demonstrate improving mastery for an improving grade.  Third, but by no means finally, on large scale projects, I allow nearly unlimited drafting.  Thus, for example, with the various sections of their report on their soil ecology project (a 5-week investigation that serves as the course exam), I tell them at the beginning that I will grade each group’s draft that they submit “as if” it were their final submission, with feedback on how to improve, and they can keep resubmitting until they are satisfied with the grade it ultimately earns.

Which brings me back to where this started:  my friend’s daughter’s presentation demonstrated mastery just as my students correct and draft until they have done likewise; so how meaningful is it to assign work some final letter grade? A grading scale is useful as a feedback mechanism, but once you use it to get students to where you want them to be, the notion that one individual’s mastery is somehow different or superior from another’s doesn’t make sense.  Again, mastery is mastery: if my friend’s daughter can spec a building, then she can spec a building; if my students can design a properly controlled experiment, then they can design a properly controlled experiment.

Granted, not every student achieves mastery of a given topic, and mastery will look different at different stages in a child’s development.  But one student having a “B” on a transcript for a course while another has a “C” for it simply tells us how far from mastery each student was; it tells us nothing meaningful about the two students and their capacity to learn.  At most, such a distinction might tell us something about how intrigued, bored, or motivated each student was about said course.  But that’s all the two grades can do, and therefore, to use them to rank or compare my two hypothetical students is either an exercise in futility or—worse—the fraudulent method for social engineering discussed earlier.

Interestingly, right now with the forced move to on-line learning, a lot of schools and districts have taken a “pass” versus “incomplete” approach to final assessments for courses rather than assigning letter or percentage grades.  They’re doing so, of course, because of the enormous difficulties encountered with this abrupt move as well as the glaring inequities it has revealed.  But what if we took a lesson from this moment and used this new approach to fundamentally alter how we understand grading moving forward? What if we make “pass” equal mastery (however we decided to define that) and anything less is simply “incomplete?” Grading then becomes a tool to show students how close to “pass” they are, and report cards become tools for sharing this information with parents.  But on a transcript, there would just be a “P” or an “I.”  Or better yet, transcripts would simply contain a list of courses where “P” was accomplished.

Such an approach would certainly be closer to the realities of adult life, for which school is allegedly preparing students and where evaluation looks nothing like our grading systems in schools.  You either qualify for the license, certification, etc. or you don’t.  You either meet the performance goals or not.  Resumes don’t included transcripts, and beyond the most entry level positions, GPAs cease to matter because it is the quality of the work you perform that determines your path in a given job or career. 

Which is not to say that we do not rank work performance in adulthood.  We do, and differences in the quality of the work of different individuals is used for everything from promotions to terminations.  But from low-status to high-status positions, as long as a worker meets the basic standards for a specific position (i.e. “pass), he, she, or they will likely keep that position as long as the position itself is not impacted by other circumstances (e.g. an economic downturn).  In that sense, there are no “grades” in adulthood.

But there currently are grades in childhood, and all too frequently (and a cynic would say “always”), these grades are used to determine who gets the low-status and high-status positions even though, as I stated earlier, the grades say nothing about the capacity to learn or be successful at a given task.  For example, my same friend at the start of this post has an older son who performed quite poorly in terms of grades simply because he could see no point to the behavioral hoops needed to earn good ones, and it took a tremendous amount of parental investment to get him through the conclusion of college.  Yet upon entering a graduate program in a subject he cared about, his grades skyrocketed, and she tells of him even being upset by a “B” in one course because now he was invested in achieving mastery.  Again, all those years of earlier grades said nothing about him as a learner.

However, they say a lot about our broken educational system, and frankly, if not for my friend’s son’s white privilege to protect him from his earlier poor performance, he might not now have the high-status position he does today.  But the topic of white privilege is for another post, and for now, I simply want to end by challenging all of us to recognize what the current grading system in our schools is really saying about our students, what it is really doing to them, and how we might fix it in the future.

References

Dintersmith, T. (2018) What School Could Be.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Fadel, C., et al (2015) Four-Dimensional Education.  Boston: The Center for Curriculum Redesign.

Newhouse, K. (May 11, 2020). Why Grading Policies for Equity Matter More Than Ever. Mindshift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55889/why-grading-policies-for-equity-matter-more-than-ever?fbclid=IwAR2Wz2sXs_xdS0rLh9Oxhrgrfx0NP5oHjSfz6Z4SSK7dY2e3zz248-L9ilM.

O’Connor, K. (2011) A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades.  New York:  Pearson.

Spener, D. (1996) Transitional Bilingual Education and the Socialization of Immigrants. Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy, ed. By P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum, & S. Sherblom.  Boston:  Harvard Educational Review.

Tough, P. (2012) How Children Succeed.  Boston:  Mariner Books.

As we are, so we do;
and as we do, so is it done to us;
we are the builders of our fortunes.
—Emerson

Words matter.  The terms and language we use to describe something color our thoughts and perceptions about it; they impact our expectations and how we feel.  In short, the words we choose to use alter how we experience every aspect of our lives, and nowhere is this truer than in the midst of the current pandemic.  Continuing to call the novel coronavirus a “crisis” rather than acknowledge it for the fire-like natural disaster that it is impacts how we respond both practically and psychologically to the situation, and that has profound long-term consequences for what happens to us as a society and as a species moving forward:  we get through a crisis; we recover from a disaster.  Again, words matter.

Part of the problem with calling COVID-19 a crisis is that the word “crisis” implies something we can simply fix.  Using this term reinforces a false dualism that humans are somehow separate from the so-called “natural” world, and in fact, much of our individual responses—from the extremes of quarantine to cavorting on beaches—have rested on the prevalent assumption in our culture that medical technology will somehow make us fixable in the relatively near future.  In other words, it’s just a matter of time before we get through this and life will get back to normal.

However, as I have reminded my students for years, we are an animal existing in relationship with every other living thing in our environments and that means that by definition anything we do is natural.  As physicist Lee Smolin puts it: we have reached the limits of the usefulness of the idea that we are separate from nature [and] need a new conception in which we and everything we make and do are as natural as the cycles of carbon and oxygen that we emerged from and in which we participate with every breath (p. 79). A skyscraper is no less natural than an ant hill; a cell phone no less natural than the leaf-spears crafted by New Caledonian crows.  All organisms manipulate their environments for their own benefit; we simply have a pre-frontal cortex that enables us to do so at a scale to which no other organism can even come close. 

Yet it is this difference in scale that can cause a kind of hubristic amnesia that only natural disasters seem capable of curing.  With these events, we understand acutely that while we can prepare for a hurricane or earthquake (e.g. by altering how we construct our houses), we cannot control whether, where, or how such things happen.  We know intuitively in these situations that we remain part of the larger natural system, whether we like it or not, and that all we can do when these events happen is to cope and adapt.  In other words, because we can never escape a disaster’s consequences, the only thing we who survive can do is recover from them.

Which is why I think it is so critical that we start referring to the current pandemic as the natural disaster that it is.  As I discussed in my last post, the virus is now an integral part of our reality moving forward, and just as the Black Plague of the Middle Ages altered forever the economies and cultures of Europe and the so-called “Spanish Flu” of 1918 changed the consequent history of the 20^th Century, COVID-19 is going to bring about fundamental adjustments in our society as well.  Just because a disaster is biological in origin rather than geological or meteorological does not make it any less devastating.

And again, words matter.  “Devastating” alters how we understand what is happening right now.  We expect devastation from a natural disaster.  We know from experience that when an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, etc. happens that there will be death and destruction and that what gets rebuilt will be different.  We understand that there will be loss that we cannot prevent, and we grasp that the actuality of such devastation—the simple fact that it will accompany a natural disaster—is out of our control.  We get that when disaster strikes, life will permanently change ever after.

We also know that there will be a need for triage when there is a natural disaster, that we will have to make difficult decisions about the different types of devastation we encounter from such an event and how we will respond to each situation.  Some choices in some disasters are pretty straightforward:  rescue survivors first; clean up the rubble later.  But in the case of biological natural disasters such as the current outbreak, the choices we make can directly impact the types of devastation that occurs because our behaviors have the power to inform how the pathogen spreads.  In other words, we can, to a finite degree, choose which type of devastation happens and the amount of it.

And that brings me back to my primary focus of this project:  education.  Right now, every school from pre-K to college is having to ask themselves the difficult question:  do we open this fall? It is a thorny decision, and it is made all the harder by the disparities and limitations that have become abundantly evident in the drastic switch to nearly universal on-line learning in the past few months. I have already written elsewhere about the impact of the digital divide and the potential economic impact on schools caused by this transition.  But the mounting evidence suggests that on-line learning is breaking down and not adequately replacing what takes place in the classroom—a simple Google search for just the terms “NPR and Education” will bury you in stories ranging from teachers who have not heard from some students for weeks to parents declaring they are simply giving up—and thus the stage is set for potentially the worst “summer slide” in history.

This phenomenon of students during summer break losing some of what they learned the previous school year is well documented, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels, and any veteran teacher knows that he, she, or they will be doing some form of remediating in the fall, usually revisiting some core skill such as reading, math, or critical thinking depending on the child.  But the “slide” can also show tremendous disparity depending on the student population in a school.  For example, Karl Alexander of Johns Hopkins University demonstrated in the early 2000s using reading comprehension scores as a metric that children from both low and high income families learn equally well when in the actual classroom during the school year (with those from low income families in fact outperforming their high income peers by 5.19 points).  However, this same research showed that over the summer months when they were not in the classroom, children from low-income households lost 44.68 more points than those from high-income homes.  You can imagine what that loss is going to look like if we are not back in schools until what some are suggesting could be 2021, and the bottom line is that while being in the physical classroom is value-added for every child’s success, it is absolutely critical for certain segments of our student population.

Nor is it only a prolonged “summer slide” that could set back an entire generation (with some set back significantly more than others!).  The impacts of social distancing and extended school closures are starting to harm our children’s mental health as well.  Reports of depression, stress, and anxiety in young people of all ages are mounting (again, a web search of just NPR will bury you in the data), and the fact that Anya Kamenetz could report on a 5-year old girl claiming “I don’t care if I die” should give us all pause. We already know the strong negative consequences these changes in mental health have on the brain’s ability to learn (see Chapter 3) as well as the challenges the very technology employed in on-line learning presents to the brain’s ability to function properly in the first place (see Chapter 9).  Thus, unless we do something soon about figuring out how to get children back into schools, one of the single greatest devastations of this pandemic will be its impact on the education of an entire generation.  Or as Evan Mandery puts it, “today’s elementary students will be in my college classroom in a decade.  Without immediate action, the resulting gap in educational outcomes will be impossible to repair.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that there is no simple way to address this need to return students to their classrooms that would not result in the devastating simultaneous increase in the number of people dying from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and it is this potential “Sophie’s choice” that is at the heart of the many dilemmas facing us because of this natural disaster.  It is also why we so desperately keep wanting to refer to this pandemic as a crisis and not the catastrophe that it is.  You don’t have to do triage in a crisis; you do not have to make choices such as “Do we devastate our children’s future to save lives or do we devastate some lives to save our children’s future?” And while I do not think the actual choice about children in schools is this binary, I do think wrestling with this (and the many other such decisions facing us) does force us to recognize the disaster character of this pandemic.  There is going to be devastation of some kind or another, and just like with an earthquake or a hurricane, there is nothing we can do to alter that fact.

Furthermore, I think it is time all of us started owning this truth in our decision-making process because until we do, we are not going to be able to make the kinds of trade-offs that triaging the pandemic’s devastation is going to require us to do in order to recover.  Schools remaining closed damages our children, and it risks damaging them increasingly more the longer they remain so.  Therefore, what are we willing to surrender to mitigate that damage? For example, smaller class sizes to accommodate social distancing will require either more teachers, longer days to split grade-levels into shifts, or holding classes on alternating days (all variants of what various European schools have started to do).  The first solution requires taxpayers surrendering more funding; the second requires teachers surrendering more of their time; and the third requires parents surrendering some income.  The alternative is to have normal class sizes in exchange for surrendering a guaranteed increase in the number of deaths. 

Thus, the simple truth is that something is going to have to give to rescue our children from the current situation, and the uncomfortable reality is that it is just not possible to navigate the devastation this pandemic has caused without making these difficult choices.  But unless we start making such choices—especially about the foundation for the future that is education—we will only make the damage and destruction that much worse.  Granted, one of the things that makes this particular natural disaster so challenging to plot a course through is the delay in its impact (we won’t see the consequences of Memorial Day weekend until mid-June at the earliest).  But the new school year is only a few months away, and if we don’t start deciding what our trade-offs will be now, we risk furthering the harm already done from the need to quarantine in place these past several weeks.  Or to quote Evan Mandery again, “the cost of the pandemic in lives lost already is too high to comprehend. If we allow the virus also to claim as victims the students who most depend on our schools to lift them up, the final tally will be truly unbearable.”

References

Ferlazzo, L. (May 13, 2020) We Might Have Gotten Remote Learning Wrong. We Can Still Fix This School Year.  Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2020/05/13/we-might-have-gotten-remote-learning-wrong.html.

Homayoun, A. (2018) Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.

Kamenetz, A. (May 14, 2020) With School Buildings Closed, Children’s Mental Health is Suffering.  NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/14/855641420/with-school-buildings-closed-children-s-mental-health-is-suffering.

Mandery, E. (May 17, 2020) We’re About to Have the Longest Summer Vacation Ever. That’s Going to Be a Problem. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/05/17/long-summer-students-coronavirus-259201.

Medina, J. (2014) Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.  Seattle:  Pear Press.

Merrill, S. (May 8, 2020).  Schools Are Opening Worldwide, Providing a Model for the U.S. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/schools-are-opening-worldwide-providing-model-us.

Smolin, L. (2018) The Philosophy of the Open Future. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 77-102.

Ain’t about how fast I get there
Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side
It’s the climb
—Miley Cyrus

Dear Class of 2020,

You have been on my thoughts quite a bit recently.  It feels like only yesterday that I was standing in front of the bonfire at Camp Pecometh, sharing a ghost story with you at the 9^th grade retreat, and yet now it feels like a lifetime ago when I was writing your college recommendations just this past fall.  During my sabbatical this year, more than one moment from our time together has found its way into one of my chapters to illustrate a point about life in the classroom, and I wish I could do more than empathize with the challenges you currently find yourselves navigating to finish out your senior year.  How abruptly and dramatically the world can indeed change!

However, once a teacher, always a teacher, and I write to your class today to offer some insights into the larger journey awaiting you following graduation in this time of great tumult.  I need to start by reminding you of something very important which I have tried to teach and model over the years, and that is this:  the truth always matters, and all lies—even the well-meaning ones we say each day to keep the social peace—have the potential to do great harm.  If you remember nothing else, remember these two things about truth and lies:  because without them, you may find yourself wandering blind through life’s many challenges, lost and adrift.

One such challenge you are already wrestling with—and one of reality’s big truths—is that you will lose some of your significant milestones.  Life is full of these important moments, and sadly, even bitterly, when they are lost, they are like eggs dropped on the kitchen floor; all you can do is clean up the mess and move on.  From my own journey, for example, I remember being so excited for my 50^th birthday and a chance to celebrate with a big party with family and friends only to find myself spending that day in a hospice room supporting my family as my mother and stepfather faced end-of-life medical decisions.  I truly understand the sorrow, anger, and frustration you are experiencing right now, and in fact, I share some of it with you.  The month of May has always been a historically sad one for me as I have prepared to say goodbye each year to people about whom I care very deeply.  But not getting to celebrate commencement with all of you…I get it; it just sucks.  None of us asked for all this loss and death.

I use that word, “death,” very deliberately here, and I do so for a reason that is more than the obvious fact that this pandemic has cost lives.  Any of you who have had my AP Biology class know that I think the only workable definition for “death” is the loss of structural organization that creates an identity.  For instance, what makes me “me” is not what I am made of; every single atom in my body has now been replaced at least 8 times over the course of my life.  Instead, what makes me “me” is the structure of the relationships between all those atoms, and therefore, as that structure begins to come apart, it is meaningful to speak of me as “dying” and once critical parts of the structure collapse, to speak of me as “dead.”

That means, though, that we can meaningfully talk of death in any situation that involves structural relationship that produces identity.  We can speak of the death of a marriage or of a friendship; we can say that an institution has died.  Being able to talk this way brings a richer understanding to such situations and moments, and that brings me to the biggest truth of all right now—the enormous, scary, “elephant-in-the-living-room” truth that even the older adults in your lives are struggling to cope with—and that is the fact that the world of three months ago, the world of your childhood, is now gone—forever. The world you grew up in is dead, and it is never coming back.

BUT—and I cannot stress that “BUT” enough!—for every death, there is always the absolute certainty of resurrection on the other side.  Again, using myself as an example, when I die, the structural relationships that once made me “me” will become reworked and incorporated into new ones:  first those of the decomposers, then some autotrophs and heterotrophs, until perhaps even eventually into another being capable of self-awareness.  None of it will have my identity (which is why we mourn), but all of it will have my life.  Even now, there are trilobites and dinosaurs and mastodons in all of us.  Death simply can’t stop life, and this pandemic cannot keep our society from resurrecting itself.

However, resurrection is not resuscitation, and that is the danger of even well-intentioned lies such as “return to normal” or “after the virus.”  These and similar falsehoods imply that we can resuscitate a world that no longer exists.  Just as influenza, measles, mumps, polio, malaria…the list goes on…just as all those pathogens are permanent parts of the human environment we live in and have adapted to over the millennia, so too is the new coronavirus now a permanent part of that same environment, requiring us to adapt to it just as we have had to adapt to other new environments in the past. 

And adaptation takes time.  The COVID-19 pandemic is like a little mini-asteroid, impacting and transforming the future of life on this planet forever, and just as life restored and rebuilt itself following the dinosaur’s actual asteroid, so too will we rebuild and create our new life on the other side of this outbreak.  Some of it will look like before; much of it won’t.  But even the dinosaurs made it through their catastrophe (we call them birds), and in fact, if not for that earlier, real asteroid, we wouldn’t find ourselves needing to address the current situation because we would never have evolved to be having the problem in the first place.

Which is not to minimize or ignore the very real pain and suffering that is going to accompany our adaptation toward what will be the new “normal.”  Nor to say that we should not do everything in our power to reduce this pain and suffering; we very much need to be doing our best to work on this together.  But the simple truth is that we don’t always get to choose the “another mountain” Miley Cyrus sings about; sometimes they are just dumped in front of us, and then we have no choice but to climb them.

That, however, brings me to perhaps the most important truth of all confronting you, the Class of 2020: we do get to choose how we climb.  What we do is who we are, and if we take from those who already have less…if we attack those who are different from us…if we endanger others just because we cannot see them…if we climb selfishly, thinking only about “me and mine,” then that will be who we become, and the world on the other side of this particular mountain will be even more broken than the pre-pandemic one was. 

But you have the opportunity to recreate the world for the better as you climb.  You can make a world where most of the wealth and power are not so concentrated among a tiny few that half of society lives perpetually in the shadow of sudden devastation and economic ruin.  You can build a place where the incredibly blue skies you have seen all spring this year remain that way into your children’s children’s future.  You can create systems of justice that dismantle the barriers of systemic racism and develop an economy that does not depend on the exponential consumption of finite resources.  You can….

It will not be easy; no successful climb ever is.  You also may not get to see what’s waiting on the other side; some summits take multiple generations.  But life is about the climb, and while the trail ahead may feel daunting and even disheartening right at this exact moment in time, always remember that hope is a verb, not a noun.  Hope is not something we possess or have; hope is something we do.  Because to genuinely hope for anything is to do the work to make it happen.  Hope for a better world? Roll up those sleeves and start the messy work of fixing it one patch of dirt at a time.  Hope for better lives for everyone? Invest the necessary time and resources to accomplish it.  The simple truth is that the only effective response to fear and despair is to make what we do have purpose and meaning:  Hope, do. Hope, do. Hope, do. Hope….

All that doing, though, requires hope’s sibling, love, and by this stage in your lives, you all know that love is never easy.  You know it means caring at least as much (if not more) about another as you do yourself.  You know it means risking lofty ideals in ways that can be arduous, uncertain, and painful.  You know it can endure like steel and shatter like glass, and you know that it and it alone has the power to cure brokenness—which is exactly why this new world will need all the love you can give it.

But as you get ready to take your love out into the world to start your individual adult journeys, your parents and I are here to tell you that you are about to learn something else about love:  it also means letting go.  And while most of this letter is intended for every member of the Class of 2020 (wherever you find yourselves and at whatever educational level), I reserve this final part for a very particular group of graduates.  As one of my all-time favorites I ever taught (yes; I can say such things now that I’m no longer anyone’s actual teacher), I wanted to honor their significance in my own life by doing something this past fall which I have only done two other times in my 30 years of teaching:  I purchased a full-page ad in their yearbook.

However, I no longer know when or even if they will ever see that ad.  So here, Class of 2020 is one of my own acts of hope—a final gift for all of you.  Congratulations!

The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation
is the philosophy of government in the next.
—Abraham Lincoln

The Challenge of Our Egalitarian Roots

American culture has always had a bit of a love-hate relationship when it comes to valuing a formal education.  On the one hand, we take great pride in our long history of scientific and technological achievements which our many universities and other centers for research have accomplished.  On the other hand, there has been an equally long antagonism toward those associated with such places and identified as intellectuals. From the “common sense” of the early frontiersman and the populism of the Jacksonian presidency to today’s Tea Party and anti-vaxxers, antipathy toward the expert and the value of expertise has deep roots in the American psyche, and even in popular culture—from the 19^th Century’s “eggheads” to the 20^th’s “nerds” to the 21^st’s “geeks” and “wonks”—we have a lengthy record of pejoratives for those even perceived as possessing a well-trained intelligence.

The source of this hostility, I suspect, lies in our egalitarian roots.  The notion that “all men are created equal” is a product of the Enlightenment’s belief that all human beings are born with the same capacity for rational thought and that, therefore, no one person is innately superior to another.  Out of this grew the foundations for our democracy because if everyone is equally capable of rational thought, then everyone is equally capable of making decisions about how society should be governed.  In other words, if everyone has the properties of the monarch, then anyone could be one, and thus, we are all political equivalents according to this line of reasoning. 

It truly was a revolutionary idea at the time, and following the necessary physical revolution to make it happen, our founders set about constructing a system for guiding all this decision making everyone is equally capable of doing in order to prevent things from either turning into a shouting match or degenerating into mob rule.  They recognized that just because everyone possesses the same capacity for rational thought does not mean that each person will employ this capacity equally well—just as the fact that all humans are born with the capacity to run does not mean everyone will become an Olympic sprinter—and so they set up the necessary checks and balances for governing a society where everyone is a potential monarch (a system enshrined in the U.S. Constitution to this day).

There is a danger, though, to an entire culture of nothing but Kings and Queens, and that is how easy it is to go from understanding everyone as political equivalents (we are all equally capable of rational decision making) to thinking we are all epistemically equivalent (every thought, belief, and idea in my head is just as valid and true as the one’s in anyone else’s).  When the latter happens, the highly trained expertise associated with the intellectual becomes dismissible, perceived as a threat to the political equivalency, or both.  Regardless, we then have a serious problem on our hands.

The Value of Science

To illuminate what that problem is, I need to digress briefly and explore that nature and character of the process of science.  I use the word “process” here deliberately because when I use the word “science,” I am not talking exclusively about the formal investigation and experimentation methods employed by people who engage in professional scientific research.  Instead, I am speaking about a way of thinking (on which such research is based) where claims about the world are made based on observable, verifiable empirical evidence and then tested to see if the truth of that claim can be falsified by objective reasons independently of the individual making it.  In other words, when I use the word science, I mean a self-corrective way of thinking that “demands that we use our senses and our capacity to reason.  And it demands that we take the world on its own terms and not conform our perceptions to accord with our preconceived notions…” (Judd, pp. 120-121).

That last part about not conforming to (potentially naïve) preconceptions is perhaps the most critical feature of this way of thinking, and the consequences of this 17^th Century revolution in thought would prove profound.  It is because of science that humans have transformed the world from a strictly authoritarian pre-industrial one where the average lifespan was 30 to the democratic, technological societies of today where the average lifespan is 78.  In fact—returning momentarily to the country’s origins—our founders were so convinced that “the natural sciences would be the engine of America’s technological and economic advancement [with science and democracy progressing together],” that “their commitment to science was second only to their commitment to political and religious liberty” (Forrest, pp. 131 & 136).  Today’s prevalent scientific illiteracy and widespread anti-intellectual attacks on science would have appalled the framers of the Constitution.

Inconvenient Truth

What happened, then, to change how we once perceived the value of science in our society to the culture-wars we find ourselves in today? The answer, I think, lies in that ellipse I deliberately left at the end of Diana Judd’s quote.  The full conclusion to that quote reads: “…and not conform our perceptions to accord with our preconceived notions, no matter how cherished they may be” (my emphasis).  Here is where that egalitarian strain in our society that wants to equate “politically equivalent” with “intellectually equivalent” gets us into trouble.  Science produces objective truths about the world—independent of our cherished notions—and we don’t always want to hear those truths.  Therefore, if I can somehow justify that my claims (e.g. that the world is flat) are just as valid as everyone else’s because “all people are created equal,” then I don’t have to listen to science’s truths (e.g. that the world is a rotating sphere).  Worse, I now have a justification—one associated with our most deeply held political beliefs—to attack those scientific truths I don’t want to hear.

Which, in the past 30 years, is precisely what has happened. Among the academic intellectuals, the assault has been postmodernism’s argument that all truth claims are inherently and concurrently claims about power and, therefore, simply tools for social ordering.  Furthermore, since truth claims are fundamentally about power, the argument continues, then the validity of any given claim can only be determined by social struggle and political competition and not some appeal to any “objective” reality.  Therefore, according to the postmodernists, “truths are decided upon, not discovered” (Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 209) and the world of today’s “alternative facts” becomes validated.

Not that the political and religious Right’s populist uses of such “facts” has needed the postmodernists to justify their own attack on the concept of truth.  For years now, the Right’s rhetoricians have successfully generated the cultural myth that expertise of any kind is intimately associated with elitism, and this connection has “fostered [in the public] a [far] deeper distrust of the very idea of truth” than any turbid scholarship from some academician (Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 204).  Indeed, the Right has been so successful at linking claims of truth to the perceived “elites” whom many of them believe are running our country that “truth is increasingly treated as the enemy of the people…meant to discipline the common person” by taking away their most cherished beliefs (Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 216). 

Thus, just like for the postmodernists, so-called “truth” becomes about control, enabling the Right to use their own brand of anti-intellectualism to attack the objective reality of scientific understanding, and the irony that the Right can use one of their own regular targets, the postmodernists themselves, to rationalize the Right’s own position shows just how far down this rabbit hole we have plunged as a culture.  It does not help (as I discussed in Chapter 9) that digital technology and “the production of ever-more time-wasting features for [our] smartphones” (Thompson & Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 13) are threatening both the social bonds and cognitive faculties that might enable us to crawl out of that hole.  But the bottom line is that the notion that there can be singular, objective truths that apply to all of us—the essential foundation on which science stands—has essentially become politicized as “the very concept of truth is treated as an ideological construct” (Smulewicz-Zuker, p. 216).

The Danger of Willful Ignorance

A society, however, that has made its standards for truth totally subjective is headed for disaster.  As Alan Sokol points out, “We live in a single real world [and] it makes no sense to use one set of standards of evidence in physics, chemistry, and biology, and then suddenly relax your standards when it comes to medicine, religion, or politics” (p. 31).  Simply denying the reality of objective truths just because we don’t like them or find them inconvenient doesn’t make them any less real or make them have any less real impact on us.

COVID-19, for example, does not care whether you believe in evolution or not; it will continue to mutate, evolving into new forms in response to the natural selection pressures of the human immune system and those new forms will continue to kill.  Refusing to believe this objective truth is not going to prevent a person from becoming infected in the successive waves of the disease and possibly dying. 

Nor does a Louisiana senator’s dismissal of the reality of systemic racism as “that’s rhetoric” stop this racism from being the root cause of the underlying health conditions putting African Americans at greater risk of dying from this novel virus.  The harmful impact of the stress of systemic racism on the health, well-being, and shortened life spans of people of color is well documented, and simply refusing to acknowledge this objective truth is not going to prevent or stop the consequent racial disparities in COVID-19 death rates we are now observing.

Finally (and at a different scale), the rising CO₂ levels in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels do not care whether you believe in climate change or not.  The structure of this molecule’s electron orbital cloud is such that it will always reflect the earth’s radiating heat back on itself, warming both the atmosphere and the world’s oceans.  Hence, the more of it there is, the warmer our planet gets—permanently altering both climate and weather patterns in ways that threaten our civilization.  Again, refusing to believe this objective truth is not going to stop the immeasurable suffering of our future children.

While these are only a few examples, the reality is that science in all its forms produces actual truths that have actual consequences.  Those truths are constantly being refined (e.g. as we have learned more about COVID-19, we have come to realize that we all should be wearing masks in public after all since far more people are asymptomatic than originally realized).  But that is the beauty of science: it is always producing a more and more accurate picture of the world (of which we are a part!) so that we can take better and more informed actions  I am not unsympathetic to the postmodernist agenda, namely that the so-called “common good” which the methods of science have served in the past has been that of white males, the military-industrial complex, and a consumerist economy.  However, just because the white patriarchy has been determining which questions science has been exploring does not make the system of thought itself is innately political in character.  We can use science to ask other questions—such as those that allow us to know the source of racial disparities in COVID-19s impact on health (and the digital divide I have discussed in other posts)—and when we ask these other questions, the consequent truths are no less objective.  It is what we then do with that knowledge that matters.

Unfortunately, the human brain can and does operate in such a way that individuals have the capacity to choose to believe that the laws of the natural world are “alternative facts” and don’t apply to them.  Fortuitously, most of the resulting pseudoscience, mythology, and superstition is relatively harmless, and the odd person who truly does choose, for instance, not to believe in gravity quickly earns a Darwin Award and is weeded out. But in the real world, trace amounts of lead, whether in paint or the water supply, cause irreparable brain damage when ingested over time, and lowering emissions standards, whether for cars or power plants, causes lung damage linked to a lifetime of asthma.  These and many like them are not “alternative facts;” they are truths (however inconvenient to someone’s pocketbook), and a civilization that bases its public policy on anything less than the objective truth is doomed.

Coda

By now, I am confident that at least some of my readers are wondering: Haven’t we strayed a little far afield from where this started? Why should we care about the nature of science, the arcane critiques of postmodernism, or the politicization of “truth?” What does any of this have to do with the value of having a formal education?

For starters, ignorance of any kind can be dangerous.  But the kind of deliberate, willful ignorance which we have been discussing IS dangerous, potentially even catastrophic, and the only way to combat either is by thoroughly, adequately educating the general public—a fact recognized quite early in the life of our republic by an individual whom many consider the father of public education, Horace Mann.  Mann saw that if the foundation of democracy is the belief that all humans have an equal capacity for rational thought, then we had better thoroughly train that rationality if we want to have effective citizens who make sound governing decisions.  What’s more, he recognized that every citizen needed access to such training if people were to resist the threats of irrationality and demagoguery present even in his own time. Hence, he pushed for the creation of public schools at a time when nearly all formal education in this country was private, work that would lay the foundation for the kind of modern public-school system we have today.

Mann, though, I think would be deeply saddened at the depths to which we have allowed education to fall in this country, and I think he would have been appalled at the amount of anti-intellectualism observable in so much of our populace—precisely because of the threat he understood it presented to democracy.  We are at a crossroads in America, and only as we make the commitment to fix our broken educational infrastructure can we confront and dispel the current and dangerous ignorance that threatens our very future.  It is one of the foundational reasons I started this project in the first place.

But another reason I started this project—and a second thing I think that makes this current discussion relevant to education—is that many so-called “inconvenient truths” aren’t just inconvenient, they are threatening.  If I am a coal miner, the only rational solutions to addressing climate change endanger my very existence; take seriously how contagious COVID-19 is and suddenly more than 30 million people are unemployed in a matter of weeks.  Education, in its broadest sense, is the only tool we have to help people understand the unwanted truths in their lives and to learn how to cope with them (whether that is retraining for eventual alternative employment or teaching mindfulness to alleviate stress and stay healthy in a time of quarantine).  It is only by empowering people to address reality’s difficult (and frankly sometimes unpleasant) truths that we can mitigate the resistance to such truths, and it is only through such mitigation that we can “remedy the public ignorance to which our children’s future is currently held hostage” (Kitcher, p. 239) and avoid catastrophic consequences for those yet unborn. An authentically engaged education is our path to doing both.

References

Fact Sheet: Health Disparities and Stress (2020) American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/health-disparities/fact-sheet-stress

Forrest, B. (2018) Betraying the Founder’s Legacy: Democracy as a Weapon Against Science. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 131-150.

Judd, D. (2018) The Scientific Revolution and Individual Inquiry. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 105-121.

Kitcher, P. (2018) Plato’s Revenge: An Undemocratic Report from an Overheated Planet. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 225-240.

Lemann, N. (2014) The Tea Party is Timeless:  Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Reviewed. Columbia Journalism Review. https://archives.cjr.org/second_read/richard_hofstadter_tea_party.php

Mann, H. (1891) Life and Works of Horace Mann, Vol. 1-3.  Google Books. https://books.google.com/.  For a quick, more accessible overview of the life and thoughts of Horace Mann, https://www.biography.com/scholar/horace-mann is a reliable source.

NPR’s Morning Edition (April 7, 2020) Sen. Bill Cassidy On His State’s Racial Disparites In Coronavirus Deaths. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/07/828715984/sen-bill-cassidy-on-his-states-racial-disparites-in-coronavirus-deaths

NPR’s On Point (March 17, 2020) Why People Distrust Experts and What We Can Do About It. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510293/on-point-books

Roser, M.; Ortiz-Ospina, E.; & Ritchie, H (2020) Life Expectancy. OurWorldInData.org. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

Smulewicz-Zuker, G. (2018) The Myth of Expert as Elite: Postmodern Theory, Right-wing Populism, and the Assault on Truth. Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 203-222.

Sokal, A. (2018) What is Science and Why Should We Care? Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society, ed. By M. Thompson & G. Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Prometheus Books. Pp. 17-33.

Thompson, M. & Smulewicz-Zucker, G., ed. (2018) Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society.  New York: Prometheus Books.

The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates

If you can cause maturity to become aspirational again,
you’ve changed the world
—Ken Dychtwald

The Curse of Blessings

I was flying back from Orlando when Simi’s essay arrived at the top of the stack of papers I was grading. Three straight days of reading science teacher award applications had put me in a foul mood, wondering why so many of my colleagues had to conform to the stereotype of being poor writers, and seeing her paper made me smile.
Finally! I thought. Something good to read!
The assignment had been to think about how modern biology’s understanding of the human body had changed society’s image of the human self—what the essayist they had read referred to as the imago hominis—and to write their own essay about whether they thought this new imago was a worthwhile one. I considered it one of the most challenging Issues in Science papers I assign to my AP biology class all year and had watched many a student struggle with it. Simi, though, possessed one of those once in a career intellects with the brilliance to grasp things the rest of us mere mortals can’t even see, and all her other Issues essays had been among the best I had ever read. I was eagerly looking forward to reading her response.
What have you come up with this time, Simi? I wondered as I began to read.
I had just gotten to her arguments about toxicity and was starting to write some feedback when the plane shuddered from a little turbulence and my writing hand jerked. I glanced out the window to see the approaching storm front and silently swore. Trying to steady my hand, I continued reading:
…I think one of the greatest symptoms supporting the diagnosis that our culture is rotting because of our toxic imago hominis is the recent surge of people in America towards Evangelical Christianity. People are lonely and without a purpose, and the easiest thing to do is turn on the television and see a man speaking out at you from a crystal cathedral and fall in love with his promises of fulfillment. This requires no real soul searching, and promises a life replete with hope, love, and faith. People can remain in front of their televisions and for a small membership fee they can have access to all sorts of “visions” brought to them by a bunch of quacks. This is spiritual bankruptcy at its finest, but it shows the incredible desperation of our society…
I could see her argument, but she was resting her link between a modern understanding of “man as machine” and the resurgence in what she considered “blind faith” on a lot of unclarified assumptions, and I wrote a note challenging her accordingly. Try reading Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God, I finished in the margins.
Then I came to what she said next and knew that, turbulence or not, I was going to have no choice but to finish what she had written. Suddenly, it was not your typical Simi essay!
…as I write this, I am struck with the sudden realization of how deeply I have personally been affected by the imago hominis. The question you posed was not “what is an alternative imago hominis” but whether the present one is worthwhile or not, so I will evade any attempt at describing what a new outlook should be. Instead, I will describe for you why personally this imago hominis is destroying me…
…I do not think that I value myself. The symptom of this is my constant reliance on relationships to provide me with a grounding root and a sense of self. For the senior poll, I have been designated “class married.” This is because since around seventh grade, I have not been single…
…So I seek to become an object in their lives, hoping that the qualities I see in them will somehow imbue me with a special value and meaning that I did not have before. The problem is that this is not reality. They are not deities or superheroes or even great human beings. They are not even close. So when they cannot give me that sense of value that I seek, I turn into something I hate…
…I heard my own voice when I read “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot yesterday…this section of the poem is a direct quote from Eliot’s wife, Vivien. When I hear a little of their story I see what pain she felt. Her wasteland was the same as my interior need. She had a brilliant husband in whom she saw the world. He made everything beautiful and meaningful in his poetry, but I am sure she never understood that he could not do the same thing to her…She seems to be maligned by those who know Eliot’s biography, but I feel a profound sympathy for this woman. And I don’t want to be like her at all…
It would have been painful enough to read words like these coming from any of my students, but here was someone I had the highest respect for–a person I would have deliberately chosen for a friend had we met as adults and not as teacher and student–and I was quite literally holding a piece of her private self in my hands.
…yet that is what my imago hominis will reduce me to if I don’t find an alternative. Personally, it is vital that I believe and not just understand that the modern imago hominis is not worthy of my veneration. I don’t know what is worthy of my veneration, but it is not that….
I read the remainder of the essay, pen down, knowing that I couldn’t hand this one back with just my usual scribbled remarks. When I got to the end, I flipped the paper over and began to compose a letter:
Simi,
I am honored that you would trust me enough to share such an honest self-reflection, and I can only hope that I can be worthy of that trust in what follows.
The plane vibrated even more violently than before, but I knew in my soul that halting the writing wasn’t an option. One at a time, I meticulously wrote each letter of each word, trying to control my shuddering pen as best I could. This is what I said:
Very early in 9th grade, I once had to ask you to stay after class to chastise you mildly about a verbal altercation with Eliza and to challenge you to recognize the leadership role you played in the lives of your peers. I will never forget your response: how you didn’t WANT to be a leader; how your ideal fantasy was to live alone on a desert island, never responsible to anyone or anything. I told you at the time that you didn’t have much choice in the matter, that simply being who you are was going to thrust such responsibility on you whether you liked it or not and that I believed you were capable of rising to that challenge.
I was reminded of that incident as I read the last couple of pages of your paper and saw you struggling now as you did then with the “weight”–it is the only word I think that carries the correct meaning–the weight of simply being who you are. Whether you like it or not (and you know yourself well enough to comment at the one point on the vain part that does), you are among the most “blessed” human beings I have ever encountered in this world. Your genes gave you a brilliant mind, stunning physical beauty, and vigorous health; while random fortune placed your genetic gifts within a nurturing, loving family with access to first-class educational resources and the kind of raw wealth and social privilege available to less than 0.5% of our species. “Blessed” is literally the only word that springs to mind.
Yet as you knew (at least intuitively) in 9th grade and are more cognizant of now, the problem with “blessings” (at whatever level) is that the “curse” on the other side of that particular coin is the responsibility of stewardship: “how will I use my blessings?” Hence, the greater we are blessed, the more challenging our stewardship becomes. For instance (as you clearly struggle with in your paper), your beauty is going to ensure the attention of nearly every male you ever encounter, and (for different reasons as primates) most women as well. The “curse” of the “blessing” of all that attention, though, is that you bear the responsibility of choosing the circle of people–and more importantly the quality of those people–whom you select to keep in your life. If you choose people not because of their qualities in their own right, but because of some void you think they will fill in you, then you are absolutely correct in your self-assessment that you will find yourself a rather poor steward of your blessings–and very much dying in very important and meaningful ways as a consequence.
Your capacity for self-assessment, however, is a “blessing/curse” I have seen you steward rather well in the time I have known you: your mind. The blessing part, of course, is that you have an amazingly gifted and able capacity to know and to understand your place in the world–how it touches you and you it (to even grasp what an imago hominis is in the first place!). You possess that rare ability for true, deep, and real self-reflection. But the “curse” is that you will always know that anything and everything–self, society, marriage, health, career, friendships, culture, etc.–COULD be otherwise: that whatever paradigms you choose to govern your life COULD be different than the ones you end up actually deciding upon and that therefore the responsibility of choosing which paradigms you actually USE is yours and yours alone.
From reading your conclusion to your paper, I suspect I’ve not said anything you do not at some level already know (but perhaps I have given you some words for your experience, and that is always at least a helpful thing). But the one thing I see after all these years that I sense you may still doubt (from my reading of your paper) is whether you are someone worthy of and capable of facing the challenge of her blessings. I am here as your teacher to tell you that I have watched you grow into someone who most definitely is. You not only have the potential to determine who you will choose to be (and with whom), but you have the potency for it.
So as much as you may still desire to live on a deserted island, I sense you are beginning to realize that the imago hominis you someday choose to guide your life by will need to be one of your own making (and not in conformity with society’s). That is how our world changes–when individuals of great potency like yourself choose to make it other than it is. You are up to that challenge.
Sincerely,
Mr. Brock

Author’s note: this story has been approved for publishing by the individual involved; names have been altered to protect privacy.

The Examined Life

Many years ago, I once read a Doonesbury cartoon where the characters of Joannie and Zonker were having a discussion—the exact wording of which escapes me—but it involved Zonker, the perpetual “Peter Pan” of the series, begging Joannie not to take the next logical steps toward mature adulthood.  In the last frame of the cartoon, Joannie’s significant other, Rick, comes in, and when Zonker learns of his support for her decision, he cries out in anguish—and here I do remember the exact wording—“And you condone this?”  To which Rick replies: “Zonker, the world needs grown-ups.”

That phrase, “the world needs grown-ups,” has stuck with me throughout my adult life, and a recent exchange of e-mails with a former student of mine made me recall it as well as my letter to Simi, and, as a result, I suddenly realized that there is something significant that I have left out from my discussion of what good education looks like.  I have obviously talked at length about the properties of good teaching and learning and the three characteristics of the authentic engagement necessary for an educator to make them happen.  Likewise, I have spent a good deal of time explaining what’s wrong with the current educational system and why there appears to be at times an active investment in keeping it broken.  But what I have not done is share what I think is education’s ultimate purpose, its Telos (to use the formal philosophical term).  To put it another way, I have not answered perhaps the most important question of all: why do we educate?

There are, of course, numerous traditional responses.  We educate to prepare people for work and careers, to produce literate citizens, to generate shared common social values, to…. I could continue, but I’m not going to because while I think these answers and many others are correct, I think they are incomplete and may even be a little “low-hanging” in the “fruit” department.  Instead, I want to argue that education’s true Telos is the cultivation of wisdom.

However, before I can explain why I think this and to explain how I think education does it, we probably need first to come to some common understanding of what is meant by the term, “wisdom.”  It is a word with a lot of weight to it, and many might argue that similar to the Supreme Court’s stance on pornography, creating a definition for this idea with precise boundaries is not practical and that, therefore, an individual will just know wisdom “when I see it.” 

Others such as former CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, Chip Conley suggest that—at least in the work environment—it is “the capacity for holistic or systems thinking that allows one to get the ‘gist’ of something by synthesizing a wide variety of information quickly” (p. 8).  It is a definition that resonates with me because I know from my own work as a department chair that the preceding decades of classroom experience definitely made coaching and mentoring my younger faculty during my third decade significantly easier and more effective.  The ability to cut quickly to the core of a problem and help them find solutions had become simply instinctual by that point in my career.

But I think the founder of NPR’s On Being, Krista Tippet, whom Conley quotes in his own book about wisdom points us in the right direction when she states that wisdom is “an embodied capacity to hold power and tenderness in a surprising, creative interplay [that] transmutes my sense of what power feels like and is there for” (p. 132).  Wisdom, I think she is suggesting, is fundamentally about how we approach our relationship with our own power and how our use of that power affects ourselves, other people, and the larger world.  It is about how we perceive power and how we use it, and that is why I like Conley’s notion of “holistic or systems thinking:” those possessing wisdom know and understand that there is in reality no isolated use of power, that instead any and all acts take place within a web of actions and relationships and that what one sets in motion will ripple out and back forever.  Wisdom, in other words, is the capacity in a given situation to understand—at the mind’s deepest and most intuitive levels—the “this” that will be reaped if a particular “that” is sown.

At least that’s going to be my working understanding for the remainder of this discussion, and thus, the question I want to ask now is: What can we be doing in schools to nurture it?  I think we start by developing and fostering curiosity because “a curious mind begins with the premise that things may not be what they seem on the surface, and that exploring the scaffolding of one’s point of view may help you uncover faulty or beautiful assumptions that aren’t necessarily obvious at first glance” (Conley, p. 99).  How we might accomplish this cultivation of curiosity I leave for Ian Leslie’s great book on the subject to address.  But once we’ve done so, we generate something even more important to the cultivation of wisdom:  questions!

Questions, I think, are the key because it is only “through the process of reflection [that] every question can become a quest, a journey of self-discovery, the facilitator of a sojourn into uncharted territory” (Conley, p. 98).  It is only as our students explore such territories that they have the opportunity to risk actions and live consequences that will enable them to explore their own relationship with power, and it is only through such exploration that they start down the path to growing (hopefully!) ever wiser.

Too often, though, what takes place in our schools encourages answering, not questioning, and what is more, even when we do make room in today’s classrooms for questioning, years of focus on answering has sadly left a lot of our students’ ability to ask already impaired.  Ted Dintersmith, for example, shares the story of an English teacher in North Dakota who decided to set aside one class period per week for students to work on whatever they were most interested in, most intellectually passionate about.  Yet when he did so, half of the students did a Google search for “What should I be interested in?”  As Dintersmith points out, “when I relate this anecdote to audiences, the initial laughter quickly turns to reflective silence.  This is what we [have done] to our children” (pp. 29-30).

Furthermore, not all questioning or questions lead to wisdom.  As authentically engaged educators, we need to be providing and asking the types of questions that—by the time our students are middle aged—have “developed and nourished a human being rather than [merely] a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer” (Conley, p. 88).  Like Michelangelo’s famous claim about releasing the art within the stone, our task as teachers is to use what I am calling “purposeful questions” such as I did with Simi’s class to chip away at the ignorance, selfishness, and irrationality hiding the wise person already present within, and while none of us individually will likely see the final “work of art” revealed, we can know that that “small pile of rubble over there, that’s mine!”

But what is a “purposeful question?” Charles Fadel suggests that these are questions that do two things:  they get students thinking about the quality of their thinking (known in the trade as metacognition) and they push a student out of his, her, or their comfort zone into a growth mindset. Thus, questions that challenge preconceived assumptions, hidden biases, unquestioned beliefs, etc. are those he considers “purposeful,” and he calls the process of employing them, “meta-learning” (see Chapter 6 for a more detailed exploration of these ideas).  I suggest further that it is only as we create conditions for “meta-learning” in the classroom that we as educators can be successful at cultivating wisdom, and for some examples of what I think that might look like, I encourage visiting or revisiting the following vignettes from this project:  the first two in Chapter 3; the second in Chapter 5; the first in Chapter 8; and all of them in the Conclusion.

Speaking of which, I would like to conclude this post by examining what’s at stake if we don’t work towards education’s Telos; what is at risk if we are not deliberately actively cultivating future wisdom in our students. As Conley himself recognizes, “our world is [already] awash in knowledge, but often wanting in wisdom” (p. 86).  But I would argue that—even worse—it is awash with “alternative facts” and false knowledge claims that have combined with a “consumer society [that] has increasingly isolated individuals from the implications and consequences of their preferences and actions.” The result, I think, has been an actual reduction in wisdom—a situation which “the internet and niche media outlets that foster the proverbial ‘echo chamber’ have only exacerbated” (Thompson & Smulewicz-Zucker, p. 8).  This, in turn, has led large swaths of our society to start “to privilege ungrounded belief over reasoned argument and evidence, [which] as we are now witnessing [firsthand], carries dangerous consequences for environmental policy and the health and well-being of [our] citizens” (Thompson & Smulewicz-Zucker, p. 12). 

I’m going to address America’s anti-intellectual streak behind this state of affairs in my next post, but for now, I think it is enough to say that we are a world in desperate need of some wisdom and as educators we need to be cultivating as much of it as we can because otherwise what kind of world will we leave for our descendants?  Or as I used to purposefully question my students: do the unborn children of tomorrow—including possibly your own—have a moral claim on your choices and actions of today?

References

Conley, C. (2018) Wisdom @ Work: the Making of a Modern Elder. New York:  Currency.

Dintersmith, T. (2018) What School Could Be. Princeton:  Princeton University Press. 

Fadel, C et al. (2015) Four-Dimensional Education. Boston: The Center for Curriculum Redesign.

Leslie, I. (2014) Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. New York: Basic Books.

Thompson, M. & Smulewicz-Zucker, G., ed. (2018) Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society.  New York: Prometheus Books.

The general public [continues] to expect the public schools to
generate a classless society, do away with racial prejudice,
improve table manners, make happy marriages,
reverse the national habit of smoking,
prepare trained workers for the professions,
and produce patriotic and religious citizens
who are at the same time critical independent thinkers.
–Jacques Barzun

Nearly twenty years ago, psychologist Robert Evans observed what he termed “a crisis in childrearing” that was leading our society to delegate to educational institutions what were once considered family responsibilities:  everything “from breakfast, lunch, and medical checkups to the prevention of complex social and behavioral problems” (p. 144).  Not only were we wanting our schools to fulfill Jacques Barzun’s farcical wish list; we were truly expecting them to do so, and the reason why, Evans would go on to observe, is because “for several decades now, as families’ developmental functioning has declined, we have turned to schools to pick up the slack, delegating to them responsibility for a growing array of students’ non-academic needs” (p. 144).  As Harvard education professor, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, summed the situation well:  

we have great expectations as citizens for the role our schools play in developing and educating our children and in creating a better, healthier society, a wish list that has grown longer and more ambitious over the decades, and one that has become overwhelming, and, I believe, unattainable (p. 143).

I share their collective work today because I would argue that what was once considered a “crisis” has simply in the intervening years become the “new normal.”  As the economic demands for the two-parent incomes required simply to live paycheck-to-paycheck have combined with the negative impacts of technology on interpersonal relationships (see Steiner-Adair & Turkle), families have relegated ever more responsibility for raising our children to schools.  And that is true whether we’re talking public, private, or parochial institutions:  when I started at my independent school in 1996, there were 2 people on staff dedicated to student support in the high school division; when I left in 2019, that workload required 5.

The basic reality is that we have asked all our schools to take on burdens that institutions originally conceived as primarily academic ones were never intentionally structured to handle, and in the past month, we have watched as all of these other functions have disappeared in the proverbial blink of an eye as schools everywhere have shut their doors—which has got me to pondering what might be the true cost of the pandemic on education beyond the immediate challenges of continuing to distribute breakfasts and lunches to those children still in need of them and the disruption to learning generated by the entire educational process needing to move abruptly on-line.

One possible answer, I think, can be found in a reader’s response to my recent update, “COVID-19 and the Digital Divide.”  For those who have not seen it, this reader shared three parental responses from friends with children (all of whom are in the 6^th Grade) about how this move to on-line learning has been for their child, and ala Goldilocks, their reactions fell along a spectrum.  The child with a teacher for a parent seems to be making this adjustment smoothly; while the child for whom the kinds of services mentioned above are clearly needed has been abandoned to her own devices (literally).  Finally, the third child appears to be thriving a little too well such that the parent—and I acknowledge I may reading too much into my reader’s words—is dismayed enough with the quality of this child’s on-line learning that said parent is preparing to abandon formal schooling entirely.

Hence, this anecdotal polling would suggest that the true cost of the COVID-19 to our educational systems will range from benign to frustrated to neglect.  Those children blessed with a teacher for a parent will likely get by (as will those who are simply naturally intrinsically motivated).  Those without an educator at home will struggle (as anyone who has listened to the NPR coverage of parental responses to the pandemic can attest), and among those struggling, it appears there will also be a range.  Some, such as the child playing video games all day, will fall dramatically behind their, his, or her peers—with all that that implies not just for that child’s future learning but potential lifetime economic earnings, etc.  Others, such as the child destined for home schooling, will be left with an incomplete education—since no single parent has enough areas of expertise to expose their child to as many “metaphors for making meaning” as a school can.

Yet, I am going to argue that even the child who is performing well (within the limitations of on-line learning)—regardless of reasons—is still facing significant, potentially dangerous harm to his, her, or their future because of COVID-19.  Why? Because the virus threatens to compromise the entire educational system for an entire generation.  Already, the Maryland State Department of Education has waived key graduation requirement for this year for current seniors to receive their diplomas.  Normally, they must pass tests in American Government, Algebra I, and English 10 or—if they do not—they must complete individual projects overseen by a teacher to demonstrate the minimal level of mastery in these areas.  Since that project alternative was put into place precisely because so many seniors have not in the past passed one or more of the required tests, it is not unreasonable to assume that we will be sending out some members of the Class of 2020 into the world inadequately prepared for college or careers with high school diplomas that could be considered almost fraudulent.

And that is just the beginning.  In Maryland alone, we are facing nearly a $3 billion loss in tax revenue (and that’s if things start to open back up economically by June).  Our governor has frozen all future spending for the foreseeable future, essentially promising that he will veto any additional spending bills that were sent to him out of this year’s abbreviated legislative session, and that includes the one funding the educational reforms recommended by the Kirwan Commission that I have written about elsewhere (see Chapter 7 and my post, “Maybe It’s Pie After All…”).

We need those reforms—and not just for the many ethical reasons I have argued elsewhere in this project; there is some simple, naked, raw economic pragmatism and self-interest at work here.  As Duke and Columbia Universities’ professor, Stanley Litow points out, we already have a jobs skills crisis in this country threatening our economic security and future because of our underfunding of education in this country, and now because of the economic impact of the pandemic we are looking at the harsh reality of needing to cut that underfunding even further.  We know that the quality and quantity of education an individual receives correlates directly with lifetime earnings and improved economic well-being, and once we start down the path of underfunding our schools, it risks becoming a vicious circle (one Litow suggests we may already have been in even before the pandemic):  less funding for schools leads to lower quality learning leads to lower income jobs leads to less tax dollars leads to even lower funding for schools….  Where does it stop?

It is a harsh and scary picture, but I think COVID-19 has not only crippled our economy right now; it may have crippled our long-term ability to fully recover that economy by decimating—potentially for years!—the source of funding needed for the best “tool” society has to achieve this recovery in the first place:  our educational system.  That may be the ultimate cost of this pandemic, and I fear it will be unless we make some really tough choices about our social priorities moving forward.  The dinosaurs didn’t see their asteroid, just as we have not seen ours; the difference is that we have the power to control how we respond in the wake of the devastation.  Therefore, to paraphrase the question I have asked my AP students for 30 years:  what will we do with that power?

References

Bowie, L. (April 14, 2020) Maryland School Leaders Waive Some Graduation Requirements for High School Seniors.  The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-graduation-requirements-waived-20200414-6kculyujdbfezfmyvwbafs2gom-story.html.

Evans, R. (2004) Family Matters: How Schools Can Cope with the Crisis in Childrearing.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (2003) The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other.  New York: Ballantine Books.

Litow, S. (March 23, 2020) America Already Had a Skills Crisis. Then the Coronavirus Hit. Barron’s. https://www.barrons.com/articles/america-already-had-a-skills-crisis-then-the-coronavirus-hit-51584990970.

NPR’s Morning Edition Education Coverage (2020) https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/834746349/some-parents-develop-school-curriculum-for-their-children.

Steiner-Adair, C. (2013) The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age.  New York:  Harper.

Turkle, S. (2017) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 3^rd Edition.  New York:  Basic Books.

Wood, P. & Broadwater, L. (April 10, 2020) Maryland Gov. Hogan Announces State Budget Freeze as Coronavirus Hammers Economy, Officials Eye $2.8B Revenue Loss. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-hogan-friday-20200410-pvcgdpkbivemhhc6gtqyjaox2m-story.html.

Education has become
the modern American caste system.
—Ted Dintersmith

What’s Missing?

With the mad dash to on-line learning to cope with the pandemic, some of my readers have asked my thoughts about this particular approach to education and whether I think it can be as effective as teaching in person.  I have said elsewhere that I think teachers basically relate for a living, and therefore, like most in my profession, I am biased toward actually being with my students.  Indeed, just the other day, the pain in the voices of teachers interviewed on NPR as they shared their feelings of loss was plainly evident, and with all the “social distancing” going on for so long right now, even the most introverted among us are recognizing the value of human contact.

However, merely missing our students does not in and of itself say anything about the educational value of on-line teaching and learning one way or the other, and therefore, I am going to suggest that we must ask two questions about this topic if we want to have a “meatier” understanding of the worth of the virtual classroom.  First, I think we need to ask what is missing when we teach this way; second, I think we need to ask what is at risk when we teach this way.  Let’s start with the former.

One thing that is potentially missing when moving education exclusively on-line is that for disciplines that rely heavily on collaboration (such as my own) it places some very practical limitations on what can be accomplished.  Yes, yes; I know Zoom is everyone’s new best friend.  But anyone who has worked in a small group knows that there is a synergy from the immediacy of the interaction that even technologies such as Zoom, Facetime, Google Duo, etc. cannot replace, and while anecdotal data at best, I have seen this firsthand even when watching a research team during my summer internship craft a shared Google Doc together.  The ideas simply flow faster and more frequently.

Which is also part of the practical limitation on-line environments have.  I have sat on enough distance meetings to know that the actual communication process itself takes longer (in part because technology’s current bandwidth simply makes the instantaneously in-person impossible), and thus, either a problem-solving process takes longer, leaving less time for the next problem, or fewer problems get tackled.  The bottom line is that an exclusively virtual education places limits on productivity.

Furthermore, for disciplines that rely on direct physical interaction, on-line learning is effectively impossible.  VR has made some pretty significant strides, but if you are a dance instructor right now, about all you can do is have your students practice individual technique.  Choreography requires dancers, plural, together in the same room at the same time.  Also, unless parents and guardians are available to follow their child’s elementary teacher’s instructions on how to do it, younger children are not learning how to read right now.  Ask any experienced 1^st and 2^nd grade educator:  there is no more hands-on intellectual activity in the world than learning to read.

Another significant aspect of in-person education that goes missing from on-line learning is the socialization process.  As I mentioned briefly in Chapter 3, you are not born with the different parts of the brain communicating very effectively, and a significant role schooling plays in human society is to help teach the cerebrum how to control the limbic system.  We need to do this because located within the more ancient limbic system parts of the brain is a structure known as the amygdala, which is responsible for what are known as the primary emotions:  fear, anger, want, and lust.  They are called the primary emotions because they are the first emotional response to anything and everything we experience.  There is then a direct line of neurons between the amygdala and the hippocampus (discussed extensively in Chapter 3), and the latter uses these first emotional tags to judge whether the awareness of given situation is worthy of shipping off to long-term memory for future reference.

What’s more, if we look at that list of emotions, this process makes perfect sense from the perspective of evolution:  each primary emotion is involved in the act of survival.  We want to remember what to avoid, where to eat, and who to mate; if we don’t, we are not very likely to pass on our genes to the next generation. 

But as instinctive responses, these are not very helpful in a society.  Anyone who has worked with, been around, or raised toddlers knows that they bite and throw tantrums (fear and anger), take and don’t share (want), and can be prone to “playing doctor” (lust).  We use the educational process (along with parenting) to teach the part of the brain that makes us fully human, the cerebrum, to control these responses and to—as parents and teacher alike like to say—“make smart choices.”  Moreover, we need to do it all over when puberty floods the limbic system with hormones and signals it has never seen before, and the amygdala threatens to take control again.  There is, after all, a reason for Mark Twain’s famous quote: “when I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

This need to teach the cerebrum to control the limbic system, though, is only one component of the socialization process.  As I have argued throughout this project, one of the fundamental things authentically engaged teachers do is serve as role models of what it means to be genuinely human, and that is rather challenging to do on-line.  Our uses of technology already have us “struggling to maintain meaningful connection with each other” and in full “relational retreat” (Turkle, pp. 6 &154). Moving teaching and learning exclusively on-line simply exacerbates this situation.  It places electronic barriers to the communal character that I have argued is the very heart of the teaching and learning process, and thus on-line learning can never adequately replace what happens in a brick-and-mortar classroom (see Chapter 9 for more about the impact of technology on education).  

The bottom line is that teaching is fundamentally about loving, and we cannot love in the same way through a wi-fi connection.  I think as a society we once kidded ourselves that we could.  But all of us currently experiencing the enforced distance from our extended families due to COVID-19 understand now—more deeply now than we ever have before—how video chatting is just not the same as in-person contact.  It can help, but it is not entirely adequate.  In fact, as Sherry Turkle observed in a recent NPR interview, the isolation from the coronavirus pandemic may finally be getting people to see what has been truly missing from our always-on-our-devices world. 

Speaking of missing, the last thing I think we lose when we move exclusively to on-line educating is some of the motivation needed to stay on-task during the learning process.  Not everything we study in order to become functional adults is intrinsically exciting or interesting, and not every subject is a given child’s, tween’s, or adolescent’s intellectual passion.  Hence, staying on-task on-line when simply being on-line itself presents a nearly infinite world of possible distractions is likely to challenge the resolve of even our most dedicated students.  Younger children especially can have difficulty focusing even when a teacher is physically present with them, and with a parent or guardian perhaps needing to telecommute in the next room, the absence of the practical supervision that in-person education provides cannot help but have an adverse impact on both the quantity and quality of learning taking place.

What’s at Risk?

In addition to limiting the amount and type of content that can be taught when the entire educational process moves on-line, there are also some negative things I think we actively risk happening when we do so.  One of them is that it can be all too easy to fall back on lecturing and other passive reception models when using this vehicle to provide content.  As discussed in Chapter 3, the employment of such methods is effectively bad brain science as these types of engagement with content do not lead to successful memory retention, and as examined in Chapter 4 and 5, the less students are actively “doing” a particular discipline, the less learning is actually taking place.  That is why, for example, teaching children to read on-line is so nearly impossible; you need someone sitting down with the child with a book, pointing at words together, using phonetics, etc. to make it happen.  Simply listening to a teacher read a story on Zoom as the students follow along with their own copy doesn’t get the job done, just as watching a cooking show does not create the conditions to learn how to cook!

Furthermore, a related risk that happens with virtual learning is that it is too easy to equate training with teaching.  Granted, there has been a traditional distinction between these two processes that says training is something we do with skills while teaching is about knowledge.  But I don’t think this distinction gets to the true difference between the two processes.  I think training is fundamentally passive in character while teaching is fundamentally active, and here’s why:  when I was in high school, I worked for MacDonald’s, and on the first day on the job, I was taken to a room and shown a video tape of how to run the fryer.  I then spent the next several work shifts doing what I had been shown.  Running the fryer was a skill I was shown and then did.  But when I was even younger, I learned a very different skill, reading, and yet no one would ever say that I was trained to read.  We would say that I was taught to read, and we would do so because learning to read required a dynamic back-and-forth engagement between myself and my teachers for me to master this skill.

Hence, I would argue that what distinguishes training from teaching is not the nature of the content or material but the mode of transition.  That is why I am concerned that educating in the virtual realm risks conflating the two.  When doing on-line teaching, it is far too easy simply to show something and think that learning has happened—to train when one thinks they are teaching—and it is yet another reason why lecturing is among the least effective pedagogical methods:  it is basically verbal showing.

However, all these potential risks to the pedagogy of teaching pale in comparison to the real risk the move to exclusive on-line learning will actually have on far too many of our children:  the digital divide.  Depending on which FCC data examined, somewhere between 19 and 21.3 million individuals in this country currently have no access at all to any fixed broadband internet connection (defined by the FCC as a link with at least a 25Mps Download—3 Mbps Upload processing speed).  These are people who literally cannot get on-line at all because the hardware for doing so is simply not in place, and most of them live in our rural areas (14.5 to 18.8 million).  This data does not include the effectively 99% of Americans who have mobile access through smartphone technologies with at least the minimum speed of 5Mps/1Mbps, but because many available mobile speeds are not adequate for the kind of information processing needed for even adequate on-line learning, this leaves millions of children effectively shut out of school as they are required with their families to shelter in place during the current pandemic.

Furthermore, there is rural and there is rural.  In Maryland and Connecticut, for example, 94.8% and 99.5% of their respective rural citizens have access to fixed broadband internet; whereas only 48.7% on average of those living in rural Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming have access.  Therefore, where a child lives right now directly impacts that child’s likelihood of moving successfully to the on-line learning the COVID-19 virus is necessitating, and because that will impact the quality and quantity of their educational experience for the foreseeable future, already existing inequities between urban and rural parts of our society will simply grow ever larger.

Yet there is an even larger group of Americans that are on the wrong side of the digital divide because of economic disparities, not just an absence of technological infrastructure.  According to the Brookings Institute, there were 18 million households in 2018 (an estimated 100 million people; roughly a third of our population!) without the ability to afford the broadband subscription necessary for on-line education.  What is more, hidden within those numbers is a little examined issue, and that is that the majority of these digitally disconnected households are located not in rural areas but in our urban metros.  Thus, 13.9 million of those 18 million households live in cities and their surroundings, and as was true with the rural data, it also matters where you live geographically, with eight of the metropolitan areas with the highest rates of digital poverty (20% of their total populations) located in the Southeast.  Indeed, if we examine the data for Maryland (see map), it will not shock any of us living here to see where the highest concentration of these zones of digital poverty are.  Nor, shamefully, what most likely is the color of the skin of the people living in them.

The simple reality is that there are entire populations of our students throughout the United States for whom a need to move entirely to on-line learning is at the very best problematic, and that’s before confronting the fact that many of these same children also do not even have access to the actual devices needed to do it in the first place.  The data on this additional disparity is too anecdotal to make statistical claims, but that doesn’t make its impact any less real or keep it from making the digital divide even worse.  Therefore, the disparities of the digital divide are even greater than I am fully able to describe, and so too, then, is the risk it presents during the current situation of increasing the injustices and systemic racism it already helps to perpetuate. 

What’s more, the students struggling with the digital divide are not the only marginalized children at risk in the all-on-line learning situation.  Those with learning disabilities, those who fall along the autism spectrum, those for whom English is a second language—all need levels of extra support not easily provided over the internet.  In addition, there are all the homeless kids and other children living with the threat of violence, neglect, and/or abuse for whom daily schooling often provides the only safe space in their lives. Thus, perhaps the biggest risk of all to the abrupt move to on-line learning forced on so many of us by the COVID-19 virus is that every child in our society who was already at an educational disadvantage is likely to fall even further behind in terms of learning, simply compounding already challenging socio-economic issues. 

It’s not a pretty picture, and I simply pray that there are enough caring adults out there in the lives of all our children to help them make it to the other side as undamaged as possible.  Stay safe; stay well!

References

FCC (n.d.) Eighth Broadband Progress Report https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progress-reports/eighth-broadband-progress-report

FCC (2019) Broadband Deployment Report https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-19-44A1.pdf

Fishbane, L. and Tomer, A. (Feb. 6, 2020) Neighborhood Broadband Data Makes It Clear: We Need an Agenda to Fight Digital Poverty.  The Brookings Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/02/05/neighborhood-broadband-data-makes-it-clear-we-need-an-agenda-to-fight-digital-poverty/

NPR Morning Edition (April 3, 2020) K-12 Schools Try To Salvage The Term By Teaching Remotely, April 3. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/03/826522327/k-12-schools-try-to-salvage-the-term-by-teaching-remotely?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=morningedition.

NPR On-Point (April 1, 2020). Staying Connected, Virtually:  What We Lose Online. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510053/on-point

Turkle, S. (2017) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 3^rd Edition.  New York:  Basic Books.

To Have and Have Not

There is a popular bumper sticker on a car along the commute I have taken to and from the school where I once taught that reads:

Equal Rights For Others
Does Not Mean
Fewer Rights For You.
It’s Not Pie.

I have thought a lot about this sentiment as I have walked by it over the years, especially during the current socio-economic situation in this country, and while at heart, I respect and agree with the spirit of it, I’m not sure letter of it doesn’t reveal some important misunderstandings on the part of  its car’s owner—especially given the level of affluence in that neighborhood, where such a liberal stance is easy to display at no real cost to one’s self.

Yet maybe…just maybe, there may be some underlying truth to this “pie” thing, and to understand why (and what any of this has to do with education), I need to start this discussion by asking the question:  what do we actually mean by “Rights?”  Like “intelligence,” it is a term we use rather loosely in our society, and it can mean anything from a privilege (I have the right to get a driver’s license once I turned 16) to an entitlement (the classic “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”).  Some have even seen “Rights” as having to do with freedom, such as Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms used to validate the Allied efforts in WWII:  Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, & Freedom from Fear.

I share this latter notion of “Rights” because the Big Four point to an important paradox about why understanding what is or is not a “Right” could mean that sometimes “equal rights for others” may, in fact, result in “fewer rights for you”—as unjust as that may sound to our egalitarian ears.  To see why, consider the first two freedoms:  like those of religion, speech, assembly, redress, privacy, etc. in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, they are all expense-free.  There is absolutely no economic cost whatsoever, for example, to every single person having an equal right to speak freely.  Hence, for me to argue that others have the right to say what they want does not take away from—or impact in any way!— my right to do likewise.

However, to argue that someone else has the freedom from want…to say, for example, that everyone has an equal right to health care, an equal right to the same quality of education, an equal right to the economic resources needed to live…  Suddenly a “Right” has financial costs, and the moment “cost” enters the equation, then equal rights for you can at least theoretically mean the possibility of fewer rights for me.  It certainly looks like it has the potential to become about “pie.”

To see how, I need to take a brief detour and introduce my readers to the study of population dynamics.  This is the discipline in biology that looks at how various factors in a given ecosystem influence the number of a given species living there, and it turns out that changes in size of the populations of any and all organisms follow two common patterns as they live and reproduce in the environment in which they find themselves.  These are traditionally known as the J-curve or exponential phase and the S-curve or logistical phase, and if you look at the graph below, you can see that during the J-curve phase, a population will explode in size.  In the real world, this phase only happens when a population of organisms enters a new environment where all the resources it needs for survival are in over-abundance, and it is what is happening with the current situation with the COVID-19 virus:  a seemingly limitless supply of humans is available to use to reproduce and so its population soars! We, of course, experience this as ever growing numbers of sick people since we effectively are the virus’ “food.”

No environment, though, has truly limitless resources, and so eventually a population of organisms reaches the maximum size that environment can support (the dotted line on the graph, known as the carrying capacity).  It then enters the S-curve phase in which reproductive rates can only temporarily surpass available resources before starvation and competition kill off enough organisms for shorter periods of exponential growth, and the cycle repeats, achieving a homeostatic population size in that particular environment.

This, by the way, is why all the epidemiologist right now keep talking about “flattening the curve.”  By slowing the exponential rate of COVID-19 reproducing and spreading among people (i.e. making the slope of that line in the exponential phase of the graph less steep or “flattened”), the virus will take longer to reach its carrying capacity, and that buys two things that are not mutually exclusive:  fewer viruses means fewer sick people in fewer hospital beds, enabling us to treat more people to help them live; more time means the chance to actually lower COVID-19’s carrying capacity through the development of better treatments and an eventual vaccine.  “Flattening the curve” and the steps to make it happen truly are a win-win!

But what, I suspect some of my readers are asking, does any of this have to do with “Rights?” Or Education? To answer, I need to elaborate first on what that dotted line, the carrying capacity, truly means.  In any ecosystem, there are finite amounts of resources; this is true even at the scale of our planet:  as boundless as the world’s oceans may seem, there are only so many water molecules on this planet. But if there are always limits on the resources available, then there are also always limits on how to distribute those resources.  For example, in a room of 3 people and 9 balls, the distribution might range from a single person having all 9 while the others have none to each person getting 3.  But the number of ways to divide the balls up between them is finite, and the same is true for the resources in any given ecosystem.

What this means for a population of organisms, though, is that there are only so many ways to divide an ecosystem’s finite resources among the individual members of that population.  That is what that dotted line represents:  both the limits on the resources and the limits on how they can be divided.  The actual graph, on the other hand, represents the size of the total population, not the number of specific individual members.  Hence, while the total population size might drop from one of the S-curve crests due to many organisms dying from lack of resources, there can and will be individuals within the population (or groups of them) who survive the drop precisely because they took extra resources away from the dying individuals.  Put simply, because there is not enough to go around in the first place, those individuals or groups who get more of what little there is make it; while those who can’t, don’t.

Yet if a “Right” has costs and even the resources at the level of the entire planet earth are finite….  Now is the picture starting to come into focus? To make it even more so, let’s do a little thought experiment using my home state of Maryland.  Let’s say that a high-quality education is a Right that all children in this state have and that the tax revenues of Maryland are the finite resource for this “ecosystem.”  We’ll let PARCC test scores and the Maryland School Report Card grades represent how high-quality an education a given group of children are receiving—which I fully acknowledge is a flawed measure at best, but it is a measure—and we’ll compare two school systems that no one living here would contest do not represent two ends of the spectrum of educational outcomes in Maryland:  Montgomery County (MC) and Baltimore City (BC).  Ready? Let’s begin.

The local tax revenues for MC in 2019 provided $10,807 of resources for each child in their schools, and BC provided $3,703 per child.  The most recent PARCC scores in MC are 3 times higher than those in BC, and MC is 10 times stronger on the Maryland School Report Card.  The correlation between resources and high-quality education seems rather obvious, which suggests that to get equal educational rights for BC children just might involve fewer rights for the MC kids.  It’s starting to look a lot like “pie.”

Yet lest I be accused of misconstruing the data, the picture gets a little more complex because the State of Maryland appears to understand that it might be “pie” and redistributes some of the state tax revenues to try to balance things out.  For example, MC only received $5,507 per child from the state in 2019; while BC received $12,223, bringing the MC total to $16,314 and the BC total to $15,926.  In fact, by the time federal dollars and all other miscellaneous tax revenues are included, BC came out on top with $17,493 for each student; while MC had “only” $16,859.  Furthermore, BC per pupil spending wasn’t even the highest in the state; Worchester County (WC) and Somerset County (SC) topped things off at $18,472 and $18,353 per child respectively.

These numbers, though, would seem to undermine the whole “pie” idea completely since BC and SC schools are among the most underperforming in the state; while MC & WC are among the highest performing districts.  It would appear that there is absolutely no correlation after all between access to resources and the quality of education received, and suddenly the “pie” idea about an equal right to a high-quality education in BC and SC meaning less right to it in MC & WC seems incorrect, if not outright false. Maybe equal rights for others when it comes to high-quality education truly doesn’t mean fewer rights for you.

Ah! But like any good rhetorician, I have saved the coup de grâce for last, and in truth, I have left out a significant feature of the total picture.  If we return to those local tax revenues, we find that WC, like MC, provided a lot of local resources in 2019 ($13,528 per child); while SC, like BC, did not have much to contribute ($3,618), and what these local numbers reflect is the larger economic disparities between these various communities.  MC and WC have some of the wealthiest families in Maryland, and as Brown, Sargrad, & Benner report, PTAs and private donors in MC and WC raise millions of extra dollars for their schools; something the communities of BC and SC simply cannot do.  Once again, then, we see that the uneven distribution of finite resources leads to unequal access to high-quality education, and if we believe that the educational rights of all the children of BC, MC, WC, and SC should be equal, then somebody has to give up some of their resources for the sake of the others.

Interestingly enough, that is precisely what the recent Kirwan Commission has recognized about the status of the different school districts throughout Maryland, and in its final report, the Commission lays out the necessary educational reforms needed to address (and redress) the current situation in my state’s schools.  But, as I discussed in Chapter 7, our governor has actually raised “dark money” to resist the implementation of the Commission’s recommendations precisely because of its estimated eventual $4 billion per year cost and the perceived threat to the business community, and in fact, during the shortened 2020 state legislative session, the most contentious debates were fueled by the question of where the money was going to come from to fund the implementation of the recommended restructurings and improvements.  The bottom line, sadly, is that with certain types of Rights, it is about “pie.” 

Yet, what if there’s more than enough “pie” to go around in the first place?

Chasing Beans

It was a cold and blustery out on the playing field, feeling more like January than late April, and I had to suppress a grin: it was a perfect day for this lesson.
“Okay, everyone.” I announced. “As an introduction to our ecology unit, we are going to look at the distribution of natural resources today, and specifically, we’re going to look at the impact humans have on them.”
I handed a stack of cheap, disposable cups to Claire to pass out, and then held up a clear plastic freezer bag containing a bunch of white beans. There were some puzzled looks.
“Scattered throughout the grass are beans like these.” I told them, pointing with my arm. “And your task is to collect as many of them as possible during two five minute time periods. Each bean in your cup will be worth one point, and today’s entire assignment will be worth a total of fifty points. So if you collect fifty beans, you’ll have a perfect score.”
There were some anxious looks.
“And if we don’t find fifty?” asked Chris, hesitantly.
“Then your grade will be however many you do.” I replied.
The ensuing protest was expected, and I held up my hand for silence. I knew I was deliberately lying, but I also knew that the whole point of the actual lesson depended on them initially believing that their grade truly did depend on capturing beans.
“I am completely serious.” I told them. “There are several stages to this simulation, and you will have lots of opportunity to gather beans before it ends. But at the end of class, the beans in your cup is your grade for today.”
There was stunned and perplexed silence.
“Are we all clear about what you’re to do?” I asked. They nodded anxiously, and I put a whistle to my mouth and blew.
The class streaked across the field like fat on a hot griddle, some methodical in their searches; while others studied their classmates and pounced when a pocket of beans was discovered. But they were all intensely earnest in the hunt.
Finally, I whistled again and waved everyone back over to huddle up.
“Gather back around,” I told them. “And very carefully look at the bottom of your cup for a letter. Without spilling your beans.” I waited until they had all done so and then gestured to three spots around me. “If you have the letter ‘I,’ go over there; if you have the letter ‘D,’ over there; and the letter ‘U’ over there.”
The girls collected into their respective groups, and I handed each one a paper sandwich bag and a permanent marker.
“Count the total beans in each group, write that number on the bag, and place everyone’s beans in it together.” I instructed.
Again, they followed my directions dutifully, but as the sole member of the “I” group, MariaLisa looked like she was about to cry. So I walked over and leaned in to whisper, “Trust me after all these months to know that I promise it will be okay in the end.”
She sniffed and nodded, giving me a weak smile, and I turned back to the rest of the groups.
“Everyone finished counting?” I asked.
They collectively nodded, and I recollected each group’s bag before putting my whistle to my mouth again.
“Five more minutes!” I said and blew the whistle.
This time, the girls raced off with even greater urgency, and where they had clamored and complained earlier, now no one spoke at all. They just silently dashed from spot to spot on the field, and when the final toot brought them back together, the sense of dejection was palpable.
“Well, I failed that lab,” declared Em.
“At least you have other people in your group!” MariaLisa protested. “You have a chance of having enough beans to pass. I don’t even have that.”
I interjected. “Everyone needs to do like before, and then we can get out of this freezing wind and go back inside for the rest of the simulation.”
So they counted and muttered and handed me their bags, and we adjourned to the classroom, where I had the girls remain in their groups, asking a member of each to write their grand total on the board. Then I began the true lesson.
“I need all groups to pile their beans in the center of their table.” I announced. “And I need at least two members from each team to get her calculator out and ready to use.”
I waited for this to happen and then proceeded. “Now I need to know what five percent and thirty-five percent of the grand total of all beans in the room is, and I need to know….”
Fingers started to fly as I rattled off a whole series of math questions about the data, jotting answers on the board as students from each group called them out. Then I paused, studying the board.
“Okay…” I said, doing some quick calculations in my head. “Caroline, your group needs to count out 128 of your beans and give them to MariaLisa, and Kate, I need your group to count out ninety-four beans and also give them to MariaLouisa.”
Suddenly the largest pile of beans in the room now belonged to one person–who simply looked bewildered, relieved, and scared all at the same time.
“We are now at the final stage of the simulation.” I said. “And when I say ‘go,’ you will have exactly thirty seconds to do whatever you wish to gather as many beans as you can.” I glanced at the clock meaningfully. “But at the end of the thirty seconds, the number of beans in your cup is the number that will determine your final grade.” I paused to let that sink in, turned to watch the clock, and said “Go.”
A look of sudden awareness came across Chris’ face, and she started to shout “Everybody, wait!” But the erupting chaos drowned out her voice like a tsunami.
They walk into that one every time. I thought, bemused.
“STOP!!” I shouted, and the room went still. Fist clenched crushed plastic cups; scattered beans covered the floor; the place looked like a grenade had gone off.
“Please take your regular seats and take out something write with and a piece of paper.” I instructed. “You need to total the beans in your cup.” I continued. “And write that number at the top of your page. Then take a few minutes to answer these prompts.” I lifted the middle board.
There were several looks of disgust as many of them realized how few beans they had. But as they studied the prompts and started to write, I could tell they were beginning to realize that maybe something else was going on today that simply struggling to collect beans.
“Okay!” I smiled. “Let’s start by easing the tension. There is absolutely no grade for the number of beans you collected today. You can all relax and take a deep breath.”
“I knew he couldn’t mean it!” swore Em. “From the very beginning, I kept thinking ‘Mr. Brock wouldn’t possibly ever really do this to us.’ ”
There were murmurs of assent.
“So why did you do it, Mr. Brock?” Chris asked with a Cheshire-cat grin.
I nodded and gestured to all of them. “Why don’t we start by sharing what you all wrote? How did it feel to be in class today?”
“Well, for one thing, I couldn’t believe you were having us chase after a bunch of stupid beans for a grade!” Dasha grumbled.
That produced a near unanimous declaration of assent, and I waited until I had their attention again.
“How is chasing after beans any different than chasing after points?” I replied.
Dasha just rolled her eyes, but several of them suddenly looked quite thoughtful.
“Come on, Mr. Brock! Points get a good grade, but beans are just…. beans!” She argued.
“Why do you want a good grade?” I asked her, and she looked at me as if I had suddenly gone all stupid.
“To get into a good college!” She stated, gesturing as if that were obvious.
“And why do you want to get into a good college…?” I continued.
“So I can have a good job someday!” She said, flabbergasted. She had taken the bait.
“And you want a good job…?” I inquired, gently.
“So that you can have money to live and raise your kids and….”
“And buy some beans for them to eat?” I asked her, interrupting.
I looked around at all of them as understanding began to dawn.
“How is chasing after beans any different than chasing after grades or anything else you need to survive?” I demanded. “You can at least eat the beans.” I waited for that point to sink in and then continued. “What you did today was what every organism has to do: find the resources to survive.”
I pointed over at the two groups who had lost beans. “But it was also about how those resources get redistributed by human behavior and choices. How did it feel to have to give up what you had worked so hard to collect?” I asked them.
“I was pretty pissed,” replied Lucy, with others in her group nodding vigorously.
“YOU were pissed?” The members of Kate’s group declared. “We lost so much there wasn’t even the chance of having enough beans to pass!”
“What about the ‘I” group?” I interjected. “MariaLisa all by herself? How do you think she felt?”
“Relieved!” came the nearly universal chorus.
“And maybe a little guilty.” Chris added quietly.
Everyone swung around to face her, looking puzzled, and she continued.
“Think about it.” She said. “MariaLisa had more beans than she could ever possibly use, and she could clearly see that your group practically didn’t have any at all. I’d feel a little guilty in that situation.”
There were a few nods of agreement and some speculative looks around the room, and I knew it was time to bring the final lesson home.
“Here’s what the numbers mean.” I told them. “If we treat your class as the equivalent of all the people on the planet, the three people in the ‘U’ group represent the portion of humanity living in the underdeveloped countries. Twenty-five percent of all humans have access to only five percent of the world’s resources. The one person in the ‘I’ group represents how many people live in the industrialized world–places like the United States and Europe. Ten percent of the world consumes thirty five percent of its resources, leaving the remaining sixty percent of the resources for the sixty-five percent of the people in the developing world.”
I paused to let all of that sink in before asking, “How many of you passed?”
Only five girls raised their hands.
“What about the whole room?” I gestured. “Were there, in fact, enough resources so that everyone could have at least passed if you hadn’t all fought for the beans?”
Several started rapidly entered numbers in their calculators, but Chris just raised her hand and I pointed at her.
“That’s why I shouted for everybody to wait.” She said. “I had multiplied all of us by thirty-three in my head and knew that number was smaller than the totals on the board.”
I turned to my number crunchers. “And if you had all shared equally…?”
The disgust in Em’s voice was almost physical. “We could have all earned an 85! We’d have all gotten a solid B!”

Is Too Little “Pie” Inevitable?

As my students discovered that day, where there is enough wealth of resources, the equitable sharing should mean that no one has to have fewer rights so that others can have equivalent ones.  The problem is that we live in an economic system that not only does not promote sharing, it is actively antagonistic to it.  Mathematicians studying capitalist, free-market economies have discovered that the best models for describing how wealth gets distributed in such economies always leads to its inevitable inequitable distribution.  “In fact, these mathematical models demonstrate that far from wealth trickling down to the poor, the natural inclination of wealth is to flow upward, so that the ‘natural’ wealth distribution in a free-market economy is one of complete oligarchy” (Boghosian, p. 77) and, therefore, total economic inequality. 

Returning to our earlier example, it appears that if the 3 people decide to trade and sell those 9 balls, eventually one of them will end up with all the balls and the other two with nothing. It is why today the best estimates are that 26 people currently possess as much wealth as the bottom half of all the humans on this planet—roughly 3.5 billion people (Boghosian, p. 72)—and to put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of a single classroom of students having as much money and resources as all the human beings living in Africa, India, and China combined.

Moreover, as these mathematical models indicate, the only way to counteract this inevitable inequity is the deliberate and active redistribution of wealth from those who have to those who have not.  Hence, the only way we will get equal access to high-quality education in Maryland (or anywhere else) is to pay for it, and the only way that happens is if some pay more because others cannot.  In addition, the old “you-get-what-you-pay-for” cliché is a cliché for a reason, and it is important to remember that the alternative to making sure that everyone has equal rights to a high-quality education contains its own costs.  In the case of schools, the documented drop in the quality of education described in my Introduction has led to a less skilled workforce and a decrease in creativity (see Chapter 9) that directly correlates with the steady decrease in entrepreneurship in this country over the past 40 years and the corresponding absence of new economic opportunity. 

That might not matter if you’re one of the 26 and their peers.  But if you are one of those 3.5 billion and their peers, that loss has been deeply felt, and if the morality of the situation doesn’t convince, then perhaps pragmatism will.  The ghosts of Louis XVI, Marie Antionette, and Czar Nicolaus (as well as the memories of my students that day) can all too readily inform what really happens when the “have nots” get desperate.  The planet earth is a finite place, and as the cheesy line from Disney’s High School Musical reminds us, we really are “all in this together.”

References

Boghosian, B. (2019) The Inescapable Casino.  Scientific American, November.  Pp. 70-77.

Brown, C.; Sargrad, S.; Benner, M. (2017) Hidden Money: the Outsized Role of Parent Contributions in School Finance. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2017/04/08/428484/hidden-money/.

Buchanan, L. (2015) American Entrepreneurship is Actually Vanishing.  Here’s Why. INC, May. https://www.inc.com/magazine/201505/leigh-buchanan/the-vanishing-startups-in-decline.html.

Gaines, D. (2019) Maryland PARCC Results At A Glance: English Scores Up, Math Down.  Maryland Matters. https://www.marylandmatters.org/2019/08/28/maryland-parcc-results-at-a-glance-english-scores-up-math-down/.

Maryland Association of Counties. (2019) Education Funding Per Student Charts for 2019. https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2019/02/20/funding-per-pupil-charts-for-2019/https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2019/02/20/funding-per-pupil-charts-for-2019/.

Maryland Public Schools. (2019) Maryland 2018-2019 Report Card. http://marylandpublicschools.org/stateboard/Documents/12032019/TabF-MarylandReportCard.pdf.

State of Maryland (2020) Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education. http://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabMtg/CmsnInnovEduc/2019-Interim-Report-of-the-Commission.pdf#page=11.