School as a Place

The whole country is talking about school right now. Mostly, we are arguing. “Kids need to be in school!” “There’s no way I’m sending my kids to school!” Right now, school is a place. It has four walls, a roof, and we either want to send our kids there or we don’t. 

This makes me sad. In the same way a pastor would be sad if someone told him or her that church was the building, not the people, or the worship. 

If school is a place, then it’s education that we should be talking about.

“That’s nice Mike but... How am I supposed to teach my kids and work from home?” “I’m an essential worker! I can’t work from home. What am I supposed to do with my kids?” 

These are valid points, and I am living them everyday. I am expected to teach remotely while helping my three kids learn remotely. Meanwhile, my wife is an essential worker who can’t work from home. These things are hard, but does that mean I should send my kids to a place called school during a global pandemic? 

The problem with school as a place is that there are too many people in too small of a place. It’s a pretty straightforward problem. When’s the last time you walked down a packed hallway? When’s the last time you ate in a cafeteria with hundreds of people? When’s the last time you sat in an indoor meeting with 30 or more people for seven hours a day? Chances are, you haven’t done any of those things since mid March. 

Unfortunately, schools are those types of places. Making schools not those types of places with a few months notice and no extra funding is damn near impossible. I know. I’ve been to a lot of virtual meetings on this exact topic. Look at professional sports. They have seemingly unlimited resources and their solution to the problem… make it about the sport, not about the place. This doesn’t stop people from being fans. It just stops them from being fans at the games. No crowded hallways. No food courts with hundreds of people. No sitting with large groups of people for extended periods of time. 

Professional sports are not a place. There are more than that. Professional sports are a pastime. They are currently providing Americans a much needed respite, because they were able to recognize that professional sports aren’t a place.     

Are you sad like me now? Do we live in a country where professional sports are more than a place but education isn’t?    

Education is more than a place, too. At least it could be. Don’t get nervous. This isn’t a speech about how everyone is their child’s first teacher or that you should think of this time as a blessing. That was April. We are several screaming matches and Disney Plus binges past that now. 

However, we need to stop thinking about school as a place. We need to start thinking about education. John Dewey, a great philosopher in modern public education said “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” 

School is a place. Education is life. Life is different right now. Why do we expect education to stay the same?  

Let’s start with the immediate problem. There are children in our homes that need learning and supervision, and we are either too busy ourselves to do it or we are essential workers. I did the research. On average, a state spends about  $12,000 per student per year. While remote learning, can we get some of that money back to parents so that we can pay people to help us? $1000 a month per kid sounds fair to me. With the unemployment rate at 10%, would that not be a boon to the economy? That money has been earmarked for the education of that child. Why force that to happen in a specific place?      

“That’s too complicated, Mike. How would states do that?” You know what else is complicated? Retooling a place called school so that there are no crowded hallways, no crowded cafeterias, and small class sizes. Do you remember a place called school? These things are essential to the functionality of that place. Writing a check to people whose address you have because they are registered for school seems a lot easier to me.

Office buildings around the country are empty right now. Companies have retooled. They have adapted. Business is not a place. Why is education?   

“My kid needs to go to school! They need peer interaction!” I couldn’t agree more. However, school as a place is not going to provide that right now. Sorry, but unless CDC guidelines are ignored, school as a place is going to suck. School as a place already sucks for a lot of kids. I know, I’ve spent the last 18 years teaching and the last 12 raising my own kids. There are few things worse than dealing with a student or a child that hates school.  

Think about all the things that kids like about school, and take most of them away. No meeting in the hallway or bathroom. No sitting with your friends in the cafeteria. No group projects. No small talk. No tag at recess. No hugging. No smiles across the room. No funny faces. No whispering when the teacher is writing on the board. 

Have you ever seen the music video for Pink Flyod’s Another Brick in the Wall? Watch it. Take out half the kids. That’s what school as a place is going to look like. 

Classroom from Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall  

Kids in masks, six feet apart, trying to hear the muffled instruction of a masked teacher. Lunch at your desk. Single file lines in the hallways. Scheduled bathroom breaks. Silence. Bricks in a wall. For what? So that we can get the kids out of our house for seven hours a day? Write a comment on this post in October if your kids are in school, enjoying themselves, and would still like to go to school as a place. 

There has got to be a better way to spend the $12,000 per student that is earmarked for our children's education. This is immediately true and this is true moving forward when COVID-19 subsides. 

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” Life is different right now. However, in many ways our children have learned more in the past six months then they have in their life before this pandemic. When a crisis strikes, values emerge. Individual values, family values, and societal values. Children have been forced to look inward. Families have been shook to their core. Society has been stripped down to its bones. 

What remains is the soul of who we are as a people. 

Professional sports on TV… 

Flexible business practices… 

School as a place? Or education as life itself?