Money. It’s hard not to think about it these days.
We are in the middle of a persistent recession. The number of Americans living below the poverty line hovers around 49 million, a stunning number if you try to visualize it. According to the Salvation Army, two out of every five Americans have received assistance from charitable groups. One in eight has spent a night in a homeless shelter in the past year. Businesses fail daily. Poor public school districts plead for support. The percentage of unemployed has been difficult to reduce by any meaningful degree. Meanwhile, the top wage earners continue to increase their wealth while others lose ground or struggle to stay even. The economic divide in our nation is the largest of any nation in the northern hemisphere.
Money and its lack also fuel the increasing political and social divides in this country — where anxiety leads to stridency, which feeds dysfunction. The damaging psychosocial effects are evident everywhere. In an era of clear financial winners and losers, more than a few suffer from the modern malady of “affluenza” — the constant pursuit of financial and material wealth that ironically leaves us unfulfilled and dissatisfied in the soul-mangling pursuit of more.
As writer Scott Russell Sanders notes in a 2011 Orion Magazine article, “Breaking the Spell of Money,” our anxiety over money drives us to act against our best interests. Specifically, we seem more than willing to “undermine the conditions on which our own lives, the lives of other species, and the lives of future generations depend” — all in the name of money.
It’s obvious — or should be — that we have a problem. It’s a gnarly conundrum, since our whole economy is built on the concept of economic growth, and this steady push has proven not to be sustainable. What gives me hope, however, is that so many smart people have thought deeply about our relationship with money — and can help lead us to a new way of thinking about wealth and progress. I recently attended a UN conference on happiness and well-being that highlighted the problems of measuring national health through the narrow lens of GDP. The speakers — national presidents, religious leaders, NGO executives, scientists, doctors, educators, even Prince Charles — underscored the need for new thinking about societal health. Some offered bright solutions.
My respect for independent schools, in part, is that they don’t ignore these issues. Yes, the primary mission is to educate children for the next level of education and life beyond. When we talk about money in schools, we have to talk about the business of running schools, about the large and small shifts we must take to remain vibrant institutions in less-than-vibrant times. On this level alone, the array of concerns is dizzying. But independent schools are also unwilling to allow education to be a purely academic exercise focused on imparting facts. They hold a deep desire to ensure that education keeps both community and high-order thinking front and center, to want graduates to be both smart and good, focused not just on their own well-being, but also on the well-being of the society.
Michael Brosnan
Editor