Surveys of parents tell us that they choose independent schools for a number of reasons, but that safety often tops the list. As a parent of three children, I understand. We don't want the world to harm our children. We'll do what we can to make sure the world doesn't harm them.
At the same time, we know we have to send our children out into the world. We arrange play dates. We take them to the park or for walks in the woods. We sign them up for sports teams or music lessons. We find ways to engage their minds, develop their talents, help them connect with other people. And we send them to school.
Of course, we fret about it, too. We constantly wonder if we are doing the right thing. We can't help it because we love our children, and because we know it's a hard world — a complex, demanding, and dangerous world.
In preparing for this issue on safe schools, I read, among other things, The Atlantic article "What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success" (December 29, 2011). I found it interesting on so many levels. Its revelations about quality education in Finland, and how oppositional Finland's approach is to our national reform efforts, should make this required reading for all policymakers. But I was also struck by what Finland's efforts reveal about the damaging competitive culture in America — how our obsession with competition hurts our schools, and thus undermines the future prospects of children.
I was going to use this space to write about the ongoing problem of environmental damage and how it relates to the safety and education of children. (For those who think the connection is tenuous, I recommend Sandra Steingraber's brilliant and sobering book, Raising Elijah, or the excerpt on p. 22.) But it seems to me that the root of our national education problems — and the root of our environmental problems — may well be this obsession with competition, with getting ahead, with an unhealthy focus on winners and losers. We are all born into the system. Post-colonial theory tells us that, even after 250-plus years as an independent nation, we embody the residual effects of colonialism — especially the dominant ideology. We fear domination, so we allay that fear by trying to dominate. It's set so deeply in our DNA that it permeates our social and political lives. It shapes our language and logic. And it's hard to see how things might be different.
But lately, the dissatisfaction with the way we do things — especially how our competitive culture undermines quality education — is growing. It's not only that there are too few winners and too many losers these days. It's more an understanding that this isn't who we want to be — and that this isn't the world into which we want to send our children. Nothing about it feels safe. Caught somewhere between a democratic nation and a free-market economy, we don't know whether to take care of each other or beat each other up.
May this conversation on "safe schools for a safer world" help us find our way.