On the State of Education, Part 4: Shifting Perspectives

I firmly believe that a part of the solution is to start by placing equality, compassion, social-emotional learning, and student and teacher health and well-being at the forefront of our educational priorities. This means changing how we think about mental, physical, social, and emotional health, and changing how we make policy. It means structuring educational environments so that we are supporting all students and empowering educators to innovate, exercise compassion, inspire and be inspired, and take care of themselves. We need to prioritize intrinsic motivation, community and personal growth, and look at non-traditional and creative methodology. And, we need to redefine success.

Right now, success is sourced externally; race, recognition, trophies, scores, wins, awards, accolades, and dollars dictate and represent personal worth. The more I collect, and the more I separate myself from other people, the better a person I become. This philosophy of combativeness, division, and external gratification - economics - is a hallmark of the capitalist ideal. Where this breaks down in its application to education is that economics rely heavily on statistics and can therefore be reductive; when applied to people, they cause us to silo (or compartmentalize) and selectively emphasize individual traits at the expense of others. In the corporate model of education, these traits include aggression, competitiveness, individuality, and partisanship. These are not inherently bad qualities, but when siloed away from other traits – like compassion, humility, and self-awareness – they become unbalanced.

The truth is that no person is just one thing, nor are we a discrete set of distinct and separate traits. I’m not just a teacher, a son, a brother, a white man, a comedian (just ask my mom). I am all of these, and I’m also a lot of other traits and thoughts and feelings and experiences that combine and are constantly shifting and evolving to make me uniquely me. Likewise, no student is just a student; each of us contains multitudes, complexities, strengths, weaknesses, triumphs, mistakes, loves and losses. We each contain Darkness and Light and the potential inherent in human nature. Our current reductive educational model robs too many kids of the opportunity to explore that potential on their terms. We deprive them of safety, fairness, wonder, imagination, and the chance to discover and integrate all of their parts in a way that utilizes their strengths and allows them to express their humanity.

Perhaps most dangerously, we create an environment where most of what kids experience is disappointment and failure without the holding space of equality, compassion, and support that allows them to learn from their missteps and build their strengths. We compound the tragedy by assigning value based on those failures for which we set them up; our system’s view of worth has nothing to do with the inherent values of the self, but rather is defined by outside forces. That external reference creates unattainable markers of personal success and yet even if we tie ourselves in knots trying to conform, it might not be good enough.

I can be clever and shrewd and hardworking, ambitious and relentless and lucky. I can be smart, aggressive, and ruthlessly motivated. I can be all of these and more and I still might not achieve those benchmarks that are rooted in the expectations and opinions of others, because I don’t have any say about that which is outside of myself. I could play my best game and still lose, run my fastest race and still get beat, get rich and still be miserable, be my school valedictorian and drop out of college, be President and still be loathed, win it all one year and be forgotten the next. I could be Black in America and live every moment of every day in anxiety and fear of being harassed or killed (it must be hard to learn anything when life is a constant struggle for survival and humanity), bussed to a destitute school and abandoned, incarcerated or killed before I even get the chance to try. I could be a brilliant, creative, compassionate kid who doesn’t make it through school because the system works again me, because the adults in the room see tragedy and failure where I might see that subtle magic that the grownups have reprioritized or forgotten. These people are not lesser human beings because we, the external arbiters of value and truth, have decided that they failed to meet some arbitrary and socially constructed benchmark; in order to save education, our system of measurement must change, and it starts by teaching kids to look inward.

We owe it to current and future generations of students to critically examine ourselves, our systems, and our goals with the intent of effecting change. What kind of people do we want to be? What legacy are we building? How will our children’s and their children’s generations feel, and what will they say, when they look back on the world we shaped for them? We must learn from the past without being chained to it; we must challenge ourselves to see the world as it is, rather than how we wish it were; and we must look to the future through a lens of mindful awareness, solidarity, hope, compassion, fairness, and reason; above all, we must look towards it with the intent to act. We must find our Unity of Purpose, because the real truth of education is that its efficacy depends on empowering all people to be the best version of their unique, multifaceted selves. Rather than perpetuating the racially and socially inequitable ideological paradigm on which this country was founded and within which it has existed for centuries, education must strive to be a unifying force. Like all worthy causes, unity requires relentlessness, humility, and an open mind and heart as we seek to understand history as it was, not just as it has been told by the “winners.” We have to put aside blame so that we may invite the possibility of learning from our past transgressions and patterns. We must learn to take responsibility without burying ourselves in shame; we didn’t make the system, but many of us do benefit from it and have to be the ones to help change it. In order to save education – and the soul of our society – we must first educate ourselves.

A Different View

I am not a policy expert, and I will leave the nitty gritty of that to the pros. However, it is clear that education needs a new direction, a new vision, a new mission. We have to start over philosophically and structurally and create a new set of core values that both aim to rectify the past and reflect the times in which we live, that prioritize the needs and wants of students while basing our curriculum in truth and our relationships in equality, compassion, accountability, and love. If children are the future, we need to ask them what kind of future they want for themselves, and then do everything we can to help them create it. To start, instead of viewing education in America as a business exclusively for privileged kids – which after more than 300 years of the same, clearly isn’t working – we should view it as the social justice initiative that it truly is meant to be. 

When I use the term “social justice,” I’m not referring to the co-opted and divisive narrative that assigns blame for every wrong ever done to every person who belongs to a marginalized group while also treating those same oppressed individuals and communities like powerless victims; I am not interested in White Saviorism. I am in no way excusing or denying those wrongs, I am simply not interested in being mired in blame or living rooted in the atrocities and injustices of the past. I am interested in learning from them; I will not be shamed into it. Blame keeps our hearts and minds closed to each other; it prevents us from listening and learning, it blinds us to the complexities and potential that exist within each of us. I am not interested in taking an eye for an eye; justice is not revenge.

I find this way of talking about the world to be no different from the oppression and “otherness” which social justice attempts to rectify. What true social justice means to me is that we must view the present with the understanding that we can’t change the past, but that we can learn from it; we must practice a mindful, accountable, and compassionate engagement in the moment in which we’re living, and we must look to the future through a lens of unity, fairness, open-mindedness, humility, and hope. By invoking social justice here, what I mean is that rather than a student’s education – or a teacher’s job – being viewed as a business transaction, we need to look at it in the context of the human principles of equity, access, participation, and equal rights built on a foundation of compassion, action, and common humanity. Most of all, we have to put students first. According to the Center for Economic & Social Justice:

 “Social justice is the virtue which guides us in creating those organized human interactions we call institutions. In turn, social institutions, when justly organized, provide us with access to what is good for the person, both individually and in our associations with others. Social justice also imposes on each of us a personal responsibility to work with others to design and continually perfect our institutions as tools for personal and social development. Social justice encompasses economic justice.”

So, what does it really mean to view education through this lens? 

Originally published on June 6, 2020