It was like we had known all along that the sky was going to fall and then it fell and we pretended to be surprised. Elin Hilderbrand
Sometimes catastrophes split you in half and even if all the pieces are there, they might not ever fit back together. Julie Murphy
Sooner or later the world comes to its senses, but oh the damage that has been done. John Kramer
Some days punch us in the gut so hard it seems we can feel the whole universe gasp with despair. Curtis Tyrone Jones
It’s a catastrophe to be without a voice. E.B. White
The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Neal Stephenson
One of the pitfalls of this policy business is that we are now drowning in the “crises” that we are tasked to identify. Everywhere you turn, there is one more manifestation of our lack of solidarity with each other, another blow to the views maintained by some (us included) that human beings are still capable of choosing life over death, growth over destruction, cooperation over nationalism and unchecked narcissism. And yet there are those times when we simply do not treat our crises with sufficient urgency, seemingly more worried about our talking points or funding streams than actually solving the problems most directly relevant to our roles and mandates.
Regardless, it was difficult for any of us to miss the urgency embedded in this week of many catastrophes just ended. For the past few days, we have been beset by some stark and painful images, some a clear consequence of human neglect but also a harbinger of a future that we are collectively not approaching well at present, one that cannot offer much comfort either to children or to those tasked with guiding and educating them.
In case you were taking a vacation this week from the news to concentrate on family or “romp through the trivial,” allow me to remind you of some of what we have done to ourselves in this most recent time. We have now reached an ominous threshold of 20 million known COVID infections worldwide – 5 million in the US alone – with most medical experts fearing that the number of actual cases (and spreaders) is considerably larger than reported. At the same time, a large oil tanker leak off the coast of Mauritius continues to directly threaten both the complex biodiversity of the country and the livelihoods of its people. In addition, many of you have surely seen images of the Beirut port blast that brought devastation to an entire city, worsening an already tenuous economic situation and calling thousands into the streets to both mourn their losses and seek explanation and accountability from and for those whose negligence allowed this to happen. There was also some sad reporting about the collapse of the ice shelf on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, a collapse larger in area than the island of Manhattan and yet another blow to, among other things, the stability of the Arctic and its multiple inhabitants. And then there were the ubiquitous images of nuclear fireballs both from the testing we now seem determined to resume and from the highly-dubious uses of these weapons75 years ago on residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons which our currently (and foolishly) modernizing arsenals dwarf by comparison.
The lessons that we can take from this week’s gallery of disturbing images are ones we have mostly learned already and then blithely discarded. That our sky in some sense is falling is not news to most. That we continue to accept these “punches in the gut,” that we continue to allow crises to break us apart with little or no strategy for putting the pieces back together again, this is symptomatic of something insidious inside ourselves. This goes beyond a failure of technique to a failure of stewardship; the courage to ensure that, at a most fundamental level, we are determined to bequeath to our children a planet that can sustain life, ensure equitable access to water and other essential resources, and provide opportunity for creative livelihoods that are less about destroying competitors and more about contributing as we are able to the well-being of the global commons.
Even before COVID, we have collectively been losing ground on sustainable development goals from food security to climate health. But COVID has pushed even our development successes to the margins, including our goals for education. Indeed, one of the more disquieting statements of the week was issued by UN Secretary-General Guterres, who noted that 90% of the world’s school-aged children have had their education disrupted by COVID, a catastrophe for a generation that will need all their wits about them if they are to manage, let alone thrive, in the (needlessly) melting, food insecure, hostile environment we are in danger of leaving to them.
In his statement (click here) the SG makes an urgent plea for governments to do what they can and all that they can to get children back in school and to properly fund their educational infrastructure. But he also recognizes, as do many in the US (such as my longtime friend and colleague Dr. John Thompson) now weighing in on how to reopen schools in the midst of a pandemic, that to some considerable degree the still-potent virus — and what Thompson describes as our struggle to put “public health over ideology” — are now dictating educational outcomes for many millions of children. A frightening percentage of such children now run the risk of permanent exclusion from formal schooling and other educational opportunity. Such exclusion will only increase inequalities and ensure that the skills and voices of millions needed to bring this stubbornly self-destructive world to heel will remain missing in action.
If this is not a catastrophe in early formation, I don’t know what is.
There are so many dimensions to this educational threat that require attention now: parents desperate to find work and who cannot adequately attend to their jobs and the safety of children marooned from classrooms; curricula which increasingly exposes both infrastructure disparities and the still-large swaths of our digital divide; children who we are learning now can both spread COVID and become victim to some of its most serious health consequences; teachers who (much like our front-line health care workers) are somehow expected to “take one for the team” as ideological divides harden and classrooms (like most every other public space) become petri dishes for evolving manifestations of pandemic threat; students who desperately need in-person peer interaction as they begin the long, complex psychological separation from their parents; children whose shelter-in-place attentions are now directed largely towards the screens that already play an outsized role in value and worldview formation.
Guterres sees within the confines of this pandemic an opportunity to “reimagine education” and we welcome that call so long as the fruits of reimagining don’t themselves widen gaps between children with access options and children without. If indeed education is to remain viable as a “great equalizer,” we do need to reach more children with formal and informal opportunity, including access to digital resources. We do need to prioritize educational funding as we consider how best to mitigate an otherwise crisis-riddled future. And we do need to take better care of our educators, primarily but not exclusively in the formal sector, remembering that it is not the task of teachers to solve in any isolation the vast social problems which they confront daily but did not themselves create. It is their task, at least in our view, to do what they can to instill hope in the future and to impart and nurture the skills that have the best chance of making that hope sustainable.
And while we are at this reimagining business, we should take a hard look at what we teach not only how we teach. In this aggrieved and distracted time, when kids are increasingly more comfortable in cyber realities than out in the crisis-driven mess we have made for ourselves, it is important that teachers take a stand against both stifling cynicism and blinding ideology. The world is still worth knowing; is still receptive to possibility and positive change; still harbors hope of greater fairness and solidarity between cultures and among diverse life forms, still has beauty to convey around nearly every bend. We need the eyes of children to remain open to wonder and possibility especially at times like these when both seem to be at a premium.
And we need to help students cultivate what the psychologist Erich Fromm called a “scientific attitude,” not so much a reverence for the “techniques” of science but a mindset that refuses to accept on faith conclusions for which there is clear conflicting evidence; a mindset that prioritizes a larger role for objectivity and realism; one that requires us to see the world as it is as the precondition for any life-enhancing modifications; one that cultivates what Fromm saw as the healthiest formula going forward – humility towards the facts of the world and a renunciation of “all hopes of omnipotence and omniscience.”
As hard as it sometimes is to imagine, our damage-ravaged societies will eventually come to their senses. The question is how much catastrophic damage we are willing to inflict on the aspirations of and prospects for “Generation C” until that blessed day finally arrives?
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