My son’s school back in Seattle is a pretty amazing elementary school. It’s public – for those of you in England, it’s a state school – and my ex-wife and I really just stumbled into it. When we bought the house that she now lives in, we were really just looking for a nice house; we had no kids and no near-term expectation of any, as she was in grad school and I was a “high powered executive.” But it turned out to be a great match for our son, eleven years after we moved into the house, a couple years after we split up. North Seattle isn’t exactly a patchwork quilt of diversity, but the school has a decent enough mix of kids from different ethnic and social and economic backgrounds, and the teachers are engaged, and the administration is pretty good too. It also has one of the most devoted parent organisations I’ve ever seen; each year they raise the equivalent of 15% of the school’s operating budget via private fundraisers (their two big ones are a silent auction, normally the preserve of private schools, and they also run the biggest Christmas tree lot in the area), and they use the budget to supplement teachers’ room costs, run an amazing set of subsidised after-school enrichment programs, and help top up various budgets around the school.
The boy will, however, be going to school in Maine in the fall, as the Seattle school district in general has more or less imploded in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. Seattle was North America’s first epicentre, and while it’s largely contained the virus since then, it’s now being subjected to “second wave” increases in infection rates, and the hinterlands of Washington State have been hit by multiple “hot spots” due to agricultural and food processing concentration outbreaks. It’s looking more and more like the school system will at least start the fall session in full virtual mode.
But that’s beyond not good: Seattle closed their schools in early March, but their efforts to support virtual and remote schooling were, to put it mildly, a failure. There were failures across the board – technological, communications related, training and personnel issues, you name it – but one of the unnamed issues, I think, was that the system as a whole had lost all focus on the foundations of educational delivery to the average student. I say this not in an accusing way; SPS (“Seattle Public Schools”) had a real problem in that the average outcome for Black and other disadvantaged minority students (known in the system as “BIPOC”, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour students) was radically, awfully terrible compared to those of White kids and what I’ll for lack of a better term call “privileged” minorities – let’s just call them KOPs, or kids of privilege, because that’s ultimately what they are. The gap in outcomes – graduation rates, post-secondary education employment and college uptake rates, truancy, grades in school, you name it – were so disparate as to be an obvious injustice. So several years ago, the district refocused nearly all of its discretionary resources – not huge in an education system with a constitutional mandate to educate everyone, but still material – towards closing that gap. Maybe more important than the modest resource redirection was the impact of the focus of top administrators and the shift in incentives downstream towards principals, mid-level administrators, teachers, and evaluative staff: the ecosystem as a whole shifted from increasing aggregate and median student results higher, to ensuring that BIPOC and disadvantaged children were able to achieve a result more in line with a broad understanding of the good.
Again, this was a vital and overdue shift in priorities. Seattle schools were top notch; the idea that marginal value should be shifted towards the most challenged students in a system which was already operating at a high level was an easy decision. But like many systems that were engineered for steady state normalcy, the SPS system broke when faced by the pandemic. The refocus of effort – and more importantly, of prioritisation – towards BIPOC kids, and towards the general value of equity in general, meant that when the schools closed down, the first principles of the system almost demanded a complete shutdown of services to all students. It makes sense, actually, in a rational way. Underprivileged students don’t have high-speed internet in their homes; many don’t have any access to a laptop. In a lockdown mode, they can’t go to the library. So while maybe 65% of students have such access, the logic of a system trying to make up for chronic inequality said “okay, 65% – you’re going to have a crappy educational experience, but that makes 100% of you have the same crappy educational experience.”
Now in a perfect world, the system would have mobilised to provide extra resources to the kids who were in that 35% disadvantaged position – but such a system would have planned for such a contingency, and maybe would have thought outside the box about educating kids in all situations in the first place. But I don’t fault the system for not doing that. It is what it is.
In any event, the teachers’ union and some advocacy groups sent out a kind of manifesto this evening, describing a vision for the school year (which they propose to begin in December or January) which involves in-person schooling but using the city’s parks and outdoor spaces as primary learning facilities, to get around the restrictions and, frankly, physical impossibilities of implementing full in-person teaching indoors under current social distancing guidelines. There’s a lot of annoying post-structuralist academia language, describing these efforts as part of anti-racist restructuring of flawed traditional modes of teaching, but the ideas aren’t bad to my ears. But they do raise the question of why they haven’t come up before. Taking kids out of either poorly ventilated, poorly maintained early 20th century prison-like schools, or overly mechanised, Brutalist monstrosities from the 50s and 60s, or strange and inoperable open plan cube farms from the 80s and 90s, and having them walk in parks and eat at picnic tables and do their math in park shelters on laptops, makes perfect sense. But the question of why no one thought of this three years ago, why no one thought that getting BIPOC kids – along with KOP kids – into a beautiful levelling world, particularly in Seattle which has snow maybe once a year and the rain is normally kind of soft and misty, leads to the question of what the bureaucrats were doing all along.
And of course, the answer is sort of obvious: they were operating within a narrow lane, trying to shed what was wrong with the current system without fundamentally changing course in terms of what they had been trained to do as educators, administrators, and yes even as parents and colleagues and friends and members of society. It’s what every successful system faces in the face of a need to change. The institutional response is to shed the bad practices, and redirect what’s left.
I think that’s at the heart of the cultural crisis being faced by the post-industrial West today. We have three crises, one immediate and strange – Covid-19 – and two more structural but somehow more normalisable, and thus harder to deal with. Those latter two are the legacies of race and colonialism across the entire Western Enlightenment project – the birthing cancers which have prevented any of the more structural solutions from gaining real legitimacy – and the ossification of a certain amount of structural classism, despite the destruction of the dehumanising kind of “classism” which marked pre-industrial societies (the kind that let upper classes regard lower classes as inhuman; today even upper classes have to acknowledge the humanity of all, but still can get away with letting the lower classes live in a kind of social sewer). These three crises experienced at once are demanding a kind of response. The classist dilemmas have been festering and waning and waxing since the collapse of totalitarianism as a potential solution with first the end of World War II and the destruction of European and Japanese fascism, then again at the collapse of Soviet Leninist-Stalinism, with the lingering poison of Chinese Communist statism still acting as a hangover. Racism and colonialism have also waxed and waned, with apartheid falling and local populist democracies rising over the decades but having to face the structural failures to address slavery’s elimination of centuries of social, financial, and political capital building in the White West, and the paradoxes of indigenous peoples’ loss of development opportunities worldwide.
Covid-19 injects a sense of immediacy to the crisis, but we live in a largely institutionalised society. By that I don’t mean that we all are in a kind of society-wide insane asylum (although if you’re an avid user of social media, I suppose you can be forgiven for thinking that to be the case). What I mean is that we live in a global society which uses institutions – governments, large corporations, multinational cooperation groups, political parties, non-governmental organisations – as the primary means of directing societal energy. Most of those organisations have been designed around the idea that tomorrow will look pretty much like yesterday, maybe a little better if we get things right, maybe a little worse if we don’t. Those institutions, when faced with change, are able to respond to small changes, because they have two very good tools: shed and redirect.
In an era of continual change, however, those tools can’t work. If change is incremental, and succeeded by periods of more or less stability during which new mores can develop and, crucially, accumulate, they are fine. But since the emergence of the internet as a medium of communication, which more or less happened simultaneously with the collapse of logistical barriers on physical connections for things like commodities and economic exchanges, the pace of change has increased, and those periods of slower change and accumulation of new mores have been eliminated. But the institutional society remains: it sheds and redirects.
What I’ve found most interesting is that the act of shedding has hit our social myths most of all. As someone trained as a historian, social myths are fascinating above all for me: they are the collectively constructed narratives that operate alongside the academically constructed narratives of my chosen art. Any time you do historical research – whether hard-core, earn-my-PhD research, or just basic check-the-Interweb and see how your neighbourhood in Scarborough got settled back in the late 1700s after the Native Americans left the area when the British lost – you first and foremost have to compare what you discover against that background narrative that society has lingering as the historiographical equivalent of cosmic background radiation.
What I’ve realised in the past few years is that the background is getting fainter; the social myths we hold collectively are dissolving, because the institutionalised society we live in has to continually shed from it what it recognises to be false (statues, “Jefferson was a really great guy”, don’t talk about Churchill’s slaughter of the Bengalis by famine), but it never has a chance to allow society to accumulate new myths. This is not a bad thing, but it makes both normal social life and academic history much harder. If we don’t have a clear, well-understood, almost concrete social myth to inform how we project the present from the past, then we’re stuck endlessly debating why we think something is “better” – a town council proposition, an increase in the municipal tax rate, a change in curriculum in our school district – because what was “good” or “bad” is no longer subject to a consensus. But also, the act of researching, studying, and writing history – which is sort of how we construct a new consensus on the social myth – is also harder, because we have nothing to either challenge or celebrate. And when we do, we tear it down immediately – both because information is now more readily accessible (internet) but also because we aren’t allowed to pause and reflect, but more importantly, to savour.
That pause is what, in normal times, allows the redirection impulse within institutional thinking to thrive and to build a new foundation for institutional success. But without that, redirection is meaningless – indeed, it can only allow for more shedding, for more erosion of whatever is left of society’s myths in prior days. Again, I want to stress that I don’t think this is a bad thing – but in a complex world, made up of human beings with limited capacity for dealing with complexity, institutions represent our stopgap to bridge our individual capabilities with the terrifying potential for complexity to overwhelm us. We might evolve to deal with complexity on a higher level over the next several hundred generations – indeed I’m hopeful that we will – but in the interim, we’ll need to have some plateaus, some times where we can construct some narratives which give some meaning and comprehensibility to a social world which is both of our own collective creation, and is so far beyond our individual or even collective understanding as to be unknowable.
Our social myths have always been wrong in that they have never been accurate representations of how we really came to be in all the messiness of reality, but they have been essential to, for lack of a better word, our mental health. Our brains are limited; the universe is limitless, but closer to home, the society we have created – as it tends towards universality, towards global reach, towards infinite electronic access – is potentially even more limitless in that it can create potentials beyond the physical. As quaint human beings in such a multiverse, we need some tangible handholds – at least until we gain comfort with floating in the infinite.
This started in talking about a school district and its challenges in navigating the lockdown, a set of core and festering inequities, and what it means for a community. For my son, I’m enjoying the fact that he’s playing with the neighbour kids on the street, chasing the dog with the garden hose. He’ll go to school here locally, or not if the school doesn’t open, but he’ll have the kids, and they’ll teach one another local myths – intensely local myths – about their parents, most of them divorced and getting by one way or another, about their dogs, all crazy, about the ocean and the tides, the mosquitoes and the horseflies, clouds, the rain, and the wind. In Seattle that wasn’t happening, but the ex-wife and I agreed to get him out of there. He still plays video games online with his friends back west, and they too in their online world are creating new myths – none of which I understand, mind you, but his friends still know to call me Mr. Freilinger on Zoom, not Peter, and that’s probably going to be part of the myth as well. He’ll learn those myths are false at some point but in the timescale of a child – even one who spends several hours a day online, whose parents live three thousand miles apart, who has navigated school, no school, and soon new school in the course of a year – he still has enough time, several hours a day, to be quiet, to let the new myths settle down, before they get challenged tomorrow.
He’s doing much better than we are. I’m trying to figure out how to apply that example. I’ll sleep on it.