2020-8-26
On the Roots of Educational Inequity: A Personal Story
“We pretend that everybody enters the school on an equal footing …”
–Jack Schneider, Education Historian
Deedspeakout recently had a close-up exposure to what it means – and what it requires – to educate a child when we spent two weeks with our granddaughter and her mother (with frequent visits from her father) in a country home loaned us by old friends. The home was spacious, safe, and surrounded by property consisting of fully-developed and planted land, with a wide range of fruit trees and evergreens. It was quite isolated, so we were able to create a small bubble of five during this time of pandemic.
Our granddaughter is still very young (15 months), but her education has already been initiated by her parents. She has been read to since she was just a few months old, something we witnessed last Christmas, when she was interested in the pictures and the strange new concept of “book.” A toy with pictures! A mechanical device demanding to be manipulated (i.e. its pages turned)! A magical object from which words emerge through the mediation of Mommy! Several months before she became demonstrably interested in the actual content, the Little One knew how to turn a book upright, to flip it over and closely scrutinize its covers (front and back) and, within a few weeks, to turn its pages from start to finish.
By summer, she had acquired a Little Library – including a shelf of her own in her parents’ apartment, conveniently situated so she could scrutinize her collection and select which volume she wanted to listen to at any hour of the day, or at bedtime, or nap-time, when there is an hour or more devoted to reading, reflection and discussion. While we were together, there was one selection of nap- and bed-time books in the bedroom, with a second selection of anytime-of-day books in the living room, along with a few new and old toys (some brought from her home, some from where the family has been staying, and some newly-purchased, or brought out, for the period we’d be staying with her).
Her library reflects the fact that she belongs to a bilingual family, so there are books in both her native languages – she doesn’t talk (much) yet, but she has a large passive vocabulary and good comprehension in both languages. Her speech may be somewhat delayed, as experts suggest is the case with children characterized by applied linguists as “true bilinguals,” i.e. those brought up from birth to comprehend and speak two languages, ultimately code-switching without any of the considerable work it takes for adults who have learned a “foreign” language later in life. The delay, however, will be worth it: she’ll eventually speak, read, and write two languages at native level, and the enhanced development of the language areas of her brain will make her a better, and quicker, learner of further languages when she’s older.
Anyone who has cared for or taught very young children knows that repetition is the name of the game. Her books are read to her again and again, at the same sitting. Sometimes, there’s an episode or particular page she finds especially enthralling, and exclusive attention must be paid to that. Her Mommy, who herself possesses an exceptionally good memory, has committed all her daughter’s favorite books to heart—that’s how many times she has listened to them with the same rapt attention, each time focused on one or another aspect of the book’s contents or illustrations.
As housekeeper, cook, and fill-in playmate for Little One, I focused on just a couple of books that were out in the common area of the home. Of these, one was devoted to shapes, the other, to numbers. Both were richly illustrated and full of, well, observational and educational opportunities for grandmothers who had devoted their professional lives to education (though not pre-school education, admittedly). She learned six basic shapes – that is, to recognize them, to point to examples of them among her toys (the round [circular] ball was a big hit, given that she had two with her), and to understand that they could be represented in various ways, including in both two- and three-dimensional form.
The second book was about two friends (Millie and Pepe) who visit the farmers’ market to stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables, starting from “one lemon,” “two cucumbers,” “three peppers” (conveniently, one red, one yellow, and one green – so, colors too were part of the instructional objective), “four pears,” etc. Little One was particularly taken by the pears; she started bringing me the book every morning, afternoon, and evening and turning to that page, asking me to repeat endlessly the triumph of pear-purchasing.
Two weeks later, when we were Skyping with her and her parents, she brought the book to the camera and turned to the same page, waiting for me to say aloud “four pears,” and hold up four fingers accordingly. She was delighted and so was I, because I recognized that her long-term memory had kicked in, and that she was now retaining not just a memory of her grandmother, but the memory of objects connected with her grandmother – the associative skill which she will later use throughout life, just as we all do, though many of us don’t consciously think of it for what it is: a miracle of neuronal connectivity, of connections which are created ab initio, slowly and painstakingly, by the adults entrusted with an infant’s care and nurture. Repetition builds connections – and the more of these, the better.
She already knew the parts of her body when she arrived at the vacation home – there were some practice and review sessions, but she had them down. With her grandmother, she learned to connect a given verb with her sense organs – i.e. “What do we do with our eyes? We see,” “What do we do with our ears? We hear,” etc. An infant’s world is, first of all, connected to things – Mommy, Daddy most importantly, and slowly, gradually, the world of other things – toys, books, food (a big one, of course). That’s why most of their first verbalizations involve nouns – food items, or “Mommy,” or a beloved toy. But we manipulate our world of thing as adults – we play with our toys, we eat our food (hopefully), we swim in the beautiful blue sea. Even if an infant can’t use a verb, she can understand it long before she utters it – another miracle of neuronal association, and one vital to developing idiomatic language early on in life.
Little One’s grandfather, whose back is in better shape than ours, was entrusted with outdoor adventures each day. These included close and intimate observation of the ants which marched across the length of the veranda, mostly near the roofline, but there was one area of the wall where they were at pint-size observational level. Hours, literally, were spent in close observation of the ants’ constant progress along that segment of wall. There was also the daily walk through the trees on the property, and a small assortment of leaves was brought into the house for further study each day. And there were roses and magnolias! She was privileged to experience their magnificent scent – so much so that when she and her grandmother studied her book of common flowers, which included roses, she put it up to her nose to catch the scent. Fortunately, there was rose water at hand, so the rose was obligingly sprayed with scent – mission accomplished – so much so that the poor little rose was torn out of its book for special, rapturous attention.
And there’s more: one day when we were in her parents’ room and the book of flowers was high in her mind, she toddled over to the drapes and began pointing to the print – it was composed of white wild roses.
This recalls us of a similar experience with her teething toy, a small-scale rubber giraffe of whom she’s very fond; in one of her books, another giraffe is pictured prominently, but in another there’s a tiny picture of a giraffe hiding out behind a window – she found it, and she pointed it out to me. This is an example of both association and generalization – abstraction; as we noted at the time, Little One is acquiring the ability to abstract the key features of an object seen in various media and dimensions and identify them as all belonging to a single “category,” a Platonic category, actually. And this represents the opening chapter in her inductive ability, one of human reasoning’s most important features. It’s built on massive exposure to examples, repeated observation, and finally accompanied by a “click” in the brain – I was privileged to witness that click occur in the case of giraffes. Little One now understands “giraffe-ness,” and the wiring her brain has developed for such recognition will be replicated countless times across countless categories of “things,” long before she goes to school.
Now Little One has returned to her Daddy’s village, where she makes frequent visits to a deer sanctuary to feed the fauns, and trips to the sea, where the lure of golden sand, and a bucket, shovel, and sieve prove as alluring to her as they did to her Mommy at the same age. She gets to smell real roses – lots of them – anytime she wants; she recently met a tortoise up close (imagine how she’ll react when she listens to Aesop’s “The Tortoise and the Hare” for the first time), and she now has her very own pint-sized red chair which she carries from room to room depending on where the grown-up action is most enticing. In a recently-sent video, we watched her stand insistently outside the closed door of her aunt’s bedroom, until her Daddy finally opened it and she walked over to the bed, patting it and repeating her own version of her aunt’s name – then she did the same with her aunt’s clothing. We knew what it was that had made it possible for her to pat that bed and repeat a single syllable, over and over again, as if repetition would make her aunt magically appear.
Our Little One is of course too young to be part of the Great School Debate in a Time of Pandemic, but we are very cognizant of how privileged she is to have two profoundly devoted parents, two grandmothers, a grandfather, and an aunt committed to her upbringing at present – that’s six adults dedicated to the upbringing of a single tiny toddler.
When we say “it takes a village,” this is what we mean. Human beings are born quite helpless and remain dependent on those older than themselves to teach, mentor, entertain and protect them for a much longer period than other mammals. They need to be learning – in fact they demand to learn – every single hour of their waking day. It’s hard work for them, and hard work for those entrusted with their care.
And because the cognitive “window of opportunity” is fairly brief for a great many core cognitive functions (in the case of a second language, the window closes at adolescence – after that, a child may learn a foreign language, but not a second mother tongue), the effort involved to ensure a child acquires what she needs to begin to function independently in the world is extraordinarily labor-intense.
There is much to be said in favor of children going back to school – whether a child is four and starting pre-K, or fourteen and starting high school, or twenty-four and starting graduate school, the “learning environment,” when it is appropriately supportive, stimulating, and focused, offers a continuation of what the original environment offered during the first months/years of life. Developed societies offer organized mass schooling because there’s a common recognition that it is to everyone’s benefit to do so, and to do it well.
Parents in the U.S. (and not only) have struggled mightily to oversee their children’s schooling the past six months. Some parents were trying to juggle remote work themselves – full-time work – with simultaneously overseeing and supporting their children’s remote learning. Millions of parents could not provide even the basic equipment (a laptop or PC) and connectivity so their children could log on to their remote classroom. Others had several children of different ages, with different needs and schedules and challenges to overcome (how many laptops are needed in a family with four children and two parents working remotely? How many households have that much equipment on hand, in good working order?) Understandably, some just couldn’t manage – we have a lot of empathy for these parents, because being suddenly entrusted with a seven- or ten-year-old’s academic progress is not something they ever expected to do, nor was it something they had prepared themselves for.
Over the past several weeks, we have been discovering that a two- or three-tier system of education is rapidly taking shape in the U.S. For those without means, their children are once more going to be left behind, struggling to access online classes due either to lack of equipment or lack of connectivity (or both, often enough), or the absence of space and quiet in their living environment. Those with some means are going to try to go it alone again, as they did from March to June; mothers (for the most part) will be forced to cut back on their working hours (assuming they’ve still got a job, of course) or quit their jobs to oversee their children’s remote educations full-time. This will have a high cost down the line – in two, or five, or ten years – both for the mothers themselves when (if) they are able to re-enter the job market, and for their children, who in millions of cases will have been overseen by mothers (fathers, sometime) whose minds are elsewhere and whose experience in educating children is minimal.
But there’s one group of parents – probably no more than 5%, but they’re a powerful and vocal group – whose children may come out of the pandemic far ahead of their peers. These are the children whose parents have the financial wherewithal to hire a private teacher (essentially, a “tutor”), either on their own (maybe the top 1%) or by banding together with a few other families to pool their resources, create a “bubble,” and set up a “private pandemic pod.”
It’s important to note that the term “pod” may differ somewhat in meaning, depending on where it’s being used. In some states, home schooling is relatively popular (although historically only around 2% of American parents opt for home schooling). Now in a time of pandemic, more students are being withdrawn from the public schools to be educated at home – essentially, home schooling – and their parents may unite with other like-minded ones and see that several students come together for that experience – in fact, different parents may undertake different parts of the curriculum, depending on their own education and background. That’s a pod of sorts.
But the most generally-understood – and philosophically problematic – meaning of the term is that given to a group of parents who band together to hire an outsider – a teacher afraid to return to her classroom, for example (that’s the commonest practice) – to oversee their children’s online schooling for a couple days a week (or for the entire week, six hours a day, in the case of the wealthier parents). For example: five parents with a total of seven primary-school-aged children get together and hire a private teacher (covering, let’s say, 25 hours weekly of “supervision and support”) for $50,000 a year (Sept-June). That’s an average of $10,000 per family, which sounds like an enormous sum to most of us, but which in fact is equivalent to a week-long vacation to Vail or the Bahamas these families may have had to cancel due to the pandemic.
These are the parents (upper-middle, lower-upper SES) whose permanent loss to the public school system would be felt most profoundly – they’re the ones, after all, who as members of the PTA/PTO can raise the money it takes to turn a good school into an exceptional one by hiring another foreign-language teacher, or developing an outstanding fine / dramatic arts program, or sponsoring an exotic senior trip abroad. If they pull out long-term, the school their child attends will lose the money it’s allotted for their education, and in addition it will lose any “perks” these people fund-raised and bestowed upon their children’s public school while they were in attendance.
Why aren’t these parents – many of whom claim to be socially progressive, left-leaning, even – concerned about the looming inequities that will result from their dropping out of the public school system? Well, there are two powerful strains in American historical thinking at work here: on the one hand, we have the ideal of an equal society for all where everyone starts on the same footing (“equal opportunity”), and has the chance to advance by working hard, following the rules, and so forth – that’s the meritocratic idea, and it’s central to the idea of “democracy” itself.
But there’s also a strong strain of libertarianism in American thought and behavior –we have a collective problem here, one which isn’t easily or quickly solvable (the pandemic) – and we’re going to do what we’ve got to do to save our own child’s future. We’re sorry for the children of the less-privileged among us, but what can we do? It’s sauve qui peut right now, and these wealthy parents are illustrating it in full.
What about everybody else’s child? Don’t they deserve a future too – not just a theoretical future (words), but an actual one (deeds)? Perhaps we should be devoting much less effort to documenting the “solutions” wealthy Americans have found to avoid exposure to the virus this academic year, and more (much more) effort to investigating and reporting on how those families who cannot afford $10,000 for a “pod tutor,” or perhaps even $1000 for a laptop, or $50 a month for an Internet connection, are trying to cope with their children’s remote learning – and then to doing something about it.
We need to help those most in need of help, not those least in need. Our current emphasis is misplaced, and we are already paying for it – the misplaced and missing “care” of all America’s children – even though the pundits rarely connect the causal dots.
“Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act.” (Proverbs 3:27)
It is in our power to act.
Further reading:
Have You Heard (blog), “Pandemic Pods”
Teacher in a Strange Land (blog), “Pod Save Us: How Learning Pods Are Going to Destroy Public Education. Or Not”