If there is anything about the winter of 2018–19 that hasn’t been pretty strange somewhere, I haven’t heard about it—and I mean everything from weather to governance. Sometimes I just need to curl up with a good book, and lately I have found a few.
It’s been four decades and change since I last picked up Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage (with its utterly forgotten subtitle An Inventory of Effects), and as social media sinks us ever more deeply into the Mass Age, a young colleague suggested I give the book another shot. And boy, am I glad I did.
McLuhan was doing a lot of crazy predicting in 1967, and a bunch of those have come true. In particular his view of where the Electronic Age was taking education has turned out to be spot-on. Try this: “The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive ‘outside’ world created by new information media.” McLuhan’s cry for making education relevant is equally clear: “The young today want roles—R.O.L.E.S. That is, total involvement.” Between pages 100 and 101 of the newish Gingko Press edition, McLuhan lays out the case for rejecting one-right-answer schooling as compellingly as any guru of 2019. Read (or re-read) this book.
My head is spinning and my heart occasionally pounding as I take in Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas. I bounce from profound guilt at the industry in which I spent my institutional career to anger at the charade that “conscious capitalists” and “social entrepreneurs” have been pulling to downright embarrassment at having been duped by a TED Talk here or an article in Fast Company there. Giridharadas’s thesis is that economic elites have arrogated to themselves the role of social saviors even as many their solutions—think some of the trumpeting from Davos, oopses from the Clinton Foundation, and the hype around Airbnb—exacerbate profound and growing economic and social inequality. He calls this perspective “MarketWorld,” and in independent schools we have become way too familiar with arguments—usually advanced by those with the economic power to prevail—that schools need to be “run like businesses” instead of mission-driven crucibles of the human spirit. While not explicitly a critique of education or independent schools in particular, Giridharadas’s argument implicitly takes independent schools to task not for their very existence as evidence of privilege but especially with regard to “community service” and other programs—including aspects of many that fall under the trendy rubrics of entrepreneurship and “innovation”—that celebrate the idea of “doing well by doing good.”
(As in, my friends, those service hours and trips to underresourced places that serve as evidence of compassion on college applications. Not that these don’t represent compassion and awakening understanding truly and deeply for many, many students, but rather in the ways we encourage and even celebrate their wielding as instruments of personal aggrandizement in our résumé-obsessed world.)
But it’s all for the kids, and on that front Dana Czapnik’s novel The Falconer (no relation to a work of the same name by our friend Grant Lichtman) stands out. The New York Times review that compelled me to buy The Falconer made comparisons to J. D. Salinger, and the book delivers. Protagonist Lucy Adler is a senior, Class of 1994, at a New York City independent school, and being Lucy is incredibly complicated. Her explorations of herself, feminism, herself, friendship, herself, class divisions, herself, racism, and what it means to be a young woman whose nature, proclivities, and propensities focus on desires and interests outside the norms of the world she must navigate are extraordinary. As an aging white guy reading this book, I was in constant amazement. I probably taught a few Lucy Adlers in that very same era, and I felt profoundly sad and occasionally embarrassed as this Lucy’s perspective unfolded in both urgent and poignant detail. As is too usual in novels involving independent schools, adults, including well-intended teachers, come off as largely disengaged and ineffectual.
(The Falconer is also a kind of love letter to the Big Apple that reminds me, strangely but happily, of Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult novel The Young Unicorns, which once inspired me to take a field trip. Its setting is also nearly contemporaneous with Whit Stillman’s New York City films Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, with their own bitter prep school echoes.)
I notice that two out of three of these books prompt embarrassment in me. Perhaps this is because I am embarrassed so often these days by the system we live in, by the leaders we have, and by my reflections on my own sins of omission. I can plead ignorance—after all, we are all works in progress from cradle to grave—and I can plead economic and political impotence. But we all have a great deal of work to do in order to fix this world, and for most of us that work begins by figuring out how and where we can actually help. I working on it.
McLuhan reminds us how we are letting technology separate learning from life. Giridharadas reminds us how the chasms between the wealthy and even the middle-class, much less “the poor,” separate us as human beings in a time when real and selfless collaboration and cooperation are more needed than ever. Czapnik shows how separating one part of the self from another through artificial social and economic distinctions adds to the already enormous burdens of growing up (though her Lucy does so, most assuredly).
Can we please, please, as educators and humans, find ways to build a world of holistic education and common purpose that allows our children to be fully and authentically themselves?