Latest Read: The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

I haven't had much of a blogging urge for a while, but I want to get a couple of thoughts out there about my latest read, so I can remember them. I'm reading The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz, a book on the damage done to kids by moving school online during COVID. It's a 300 page popular book with a certain font and layout, so I thought I would find it unremarkable. But in chapter 1 I'm hooked. She goes into the history of education in America, even as far back as Colonial times, which is not something I'd expect in this genre.

I like three points in particular:

1) Americans like the idea of education as "fixing" people once and for all, so they never need fixing again. We'll educate them and then poverty is fixed. We'll educate them and then they're virtuous people. We'll educate them and then they're whatever it is that we need them to be so we can believe that some perennial problem is solved. 

It's largely folly, but it's what we believe in this culture. Liberals believe it because it means that a social service (allegedly) fixed some problem. Conservatives believe it because they've taught a man to fish and now he (allegedly) never needs feeding again.

I've heard this critique of the culture before, but I've only heard it from a few people. But Kamenetz is one of those wise few. That makes her stand out among writers on education. I need to pay attention to her.

2) It is hence unsurprising that in a country with far less of a safety net than peer countries of similar wealth and cultural heritage, education would be one of the few universal guarantees. We guarantee public education to rich and poor. We guarantee it to the disabled. We guarantee it to teenagers in jail, apparently. (This was news to me, but she's an NPR reporter focused on education, so I presume she's looked into this.) We might not guarantee everyone a great education, but it's the one service we guarantee in some form.

This is part of why schools are the main anti-hunger program in the country. We feed poor kids...via school. We might not feed them anything terribly healthy, but this is how we feed them.

She makes the interesting point that the commitment runs so deep that even profoundly disabled kids who will never gain the ability to communicate much are still guaranteed special education. I confess that I had often privately thought that this was a bit much, a well-meaning but inefficient way of meeting needs that aren't really amenable to school intervention. I've known a few kids in that situation, I understand why it's done, I even feel good for them. But part of me always wondered if it's really necessary to address their needs this way instead of some other route.

But Kamenetz makes the interesting point that this is a marker of our dedication to this universal guarantee. If we didn't go there, if we eroded the guarantee for them, we could erode it for more people. And soon we'd erode it for people who have needs that really are best met via school. I can respect that point.

It's strange that an anti-intellectual country like ours would be so committed to schools. Indeed, maybe having an anti-intellectual culture value schools in all the wrong ways just exacerbates our educational problems. But value them we do.

3) Until March of 2020. And then we shut them down. And now we see so many problems. Because we shut down something we've never fully backed away from previously. That has a lot of deep implications beyond the immediate, narrow questions of whether Learning Objectives 2b and 2c on Official Checklist B612 were met. There's always a way to check a box and pretend that you did so honestly.

But walking away from one of your few (supposedly) ironclad commitments? That does something to a culture. That sort of thing can shut down a whole bunch of non-obvious circuits. The conservative in me thinks we flipped a switch on things we never understood and don't really know how to reboot. A progressive optimist would say "Oh, just fund these programs that are Recommended By Experts. It's Best Practice." But I don't think societies are that simple.