We can all agree. (But can we?)

The New York Times recently ran a series a few weeks ago called “What Is School For?” in which writers with various kinds of expertise shared replied to the question. The pieces are worth reading, and the answers were solid. School is for providing care, especially for kids who aren’t receiving enough of it in other areas of their lives. School is for learning to read (which it turns out we’re not doing very well). School is for creating citizens, based in truthful history.

In one related panel with the new breed of boots-on-the-ground parent activists, a dad who was seeking common ground in the purpose of school said, “I think we can all agree that we want our kids to succeed.”

No one hit pause on that statement and asked the group to unwrap “success.” This surprised me as we’ve been unwrapping it for years, so that now many of us no longer buy the unspoken definition “success” as shorthand for a house, marriage and kids, a solid job, a vacation every year, and all the material accoutrements that one can afford. We’ve poked holes in all of the problems with this equation, from who can get married, to the ways in which jobs are no longer the harbors of safety they once were with pensions and gold watches at the end of decades of service. The way they were only ever this for some. The way that housing was out of reach for some and now for many. And the way all of this, especially that last piece about material accoutrements – the TV, the cell phone plan, the computers, the cars, the larger house – are all unsustainable for an environment that is hollering at us to Just Stop It Already!

I wish the moderator had stopped them and asked what “success” might mean in a world that really needs to change NOW, not tomorrow, and certainly not in ten years. Knowing the changes that are already unfolding, what is the role of school in preparing us? Some people call this future readiness – the skills and habits of being we need in order to respond to a rapidly changing world. It’s the ability to say, “Ok, Pandemic. Ok, Giant Heat Wave. Ok, Massive Human Migration. I see you and I can shift what I’m doing and respond. I have the emotional capacity not to become overwhelmed but to stay present to what’s needed.”

Coming out of the last two years, I was kind of shocked that none of those New York Times writers focused on future readiness. In my family, a joke emerged about this. My daughter, an artist who did well in standardized school mainly because her anxiety drove her to do so, hand-sewed masks and helped me cook and prepare a garden as my son was up in his bedroom taking multiple AP classes. When the Apocalypse comes, she was the kid I wanted with me, while all those strong AP scores weren’t going to do diddly. Sewing and canning and caring for others? These things were going to matter.

As a friend pointed out recently, the higher math and science my son was learning are very important to helping us figure out a way beyond the oncoming energy crisis. She’s right. I don’t mean to suggest tossing out calc and physics.

And yet did you have moments in the spring and summer of 2020 of realizing what skills you don’t possess that maybe it was time to bone up on? Did you, like me, anxiously wonder what would happen if all of the computers crashed and you couldn’t learn these skills via Youtube. How the heck else can you figure out how to mend a sweater, or fix a leaky toilet, or plant a garden? Because if you went through the same educational system as most of us, you certainly didn’t learn these things in school, and chances are good that your parents don’t know how to do them either.

Some other things you may not have learned at school that could prove useful in the future-that-is-already-here: how to be a good caretaker, how to listen deeply, how to ask really good questions, how to reset your nervous system, how to assist someone in the midst of a panic attack or having suicidal ideations.

If school is about tending and augmenting the growth of the organ that separates us from most animals, the brain, don’t we want to assist the growth of the entire brain? Neuroscientists have hugely increased our understanding of the thing that sits atop the rest of our body and of which we’re so proud. It now accepted that the human brain is wired for empathy, for spirituality, and for connectedness. And yet schools basically ignore these vast expanses of our humanness in favor of memorizing facts. To some extent, calculus is valued not only because of what can be done with it — amazing, complicated things — but also because can test it in ways that we can’t test skills of imagination and empathy.

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I am writing this from a unique vantage point. In a few weeks, I am leaving a job that I’ve been in for more than a decade in order to start my own business and do work that is of and for community. I am doing the unthinkable of saying goodbye to a salary and benefits in favor of unknown compensation. I am exiting a clear system of hierarchical rewards for one in which I choose to find satisfaction via connection with others and providing support for emerging ideas.

At a moment when many of us are questioning the system that short hands “success” for all of the above mentioned paraphernalia,  I am stepping off what admittedly feels like a cliff and into a world that I want to believe is possible.

Perhaps the issue is the word success which is dangled in front of us as the be all and end all. It’s a word that can be used, as it was by that dad, as a sort of no duh goal that of course we can all agree on. Its Latin roots are in result and outcome and, most tellingly, ascension. If we reward results, what about the process? If we are only concerned with the outcome, what about the present moment? If we’re always trying to ascend, when and where does it stop?  

I am scared shitless. Don’t get me wrong. This stepping off the ladder is terrifying. And it is necessary to my sense of self, my internal compass of what a good life is – one connected to others, in which my days have a pace that is not clocked or measured by monetary gain, in which the bread I bake is as valued as any report I could write. I’ll send a postcard when I get there!