Should schools pay attention to what their kids think?
Casual criticism of schools' responsive approach points out journalists' and citizens' failure to apply logic constructively.
The latest installment in the popular media’s fixation with New York City private schools, this New York Times article called “Privilege is in Crisis,” presents a few interesting thoughts.
Though I generally find the clickbaity fixation on critiquing private schools useless, I’ve found it, at times, useful. I guess that’s the point. And while it’s neither professionally appropriate nor of interest to me to propagate this wealth-porn approach to social criticism, I wanted to comment on a part of this specific essay that concerns me.
It was hard for me to judge the real purpose of an article like this, but one line did jump out at me – a parenthetical: “A hallmark of contemporary privilege is that it is always listening; it hears you.”
Is that a note of derision that I hear?
From a writer’s perspective, I understand the gesture to subtly, almost ironically, bury the most profound implication of a problem in a dramatic parenthetical. But it’s a tiresome move. Within the context of this article, the author, Ginia Bellafante, suggests but does not exist that an identity crisis around “woke” dress code revisions comes from the new – and, the tone seems to suggest, ridiculous – desire of centers of privilege to actually listen to their students. It’s a flawed, and dangerous, application of logic.
Here’s the flaw in Bellafante’s approach: if we all slow down, we can recognize that broad frameworks and approaches that have negative outcomes aren’t inherently negative. Sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, they’re improperly implemented. Some things require revision, not rejection.
When I teach students to think through and explain their ideas in language, I do ask them to use backward logic like Bellafante’s in order to identify possible sources of problems, conflicts, questions, and emotions. If a person wants to move forward using the stimulus of an emotional response – anger, sadness, outrage, or joy – she can start to think through the steps that led to it in order to find more nuance. For most problems, sources are not singular: strong logic, and strong writing, identifies and triangulates multiple sources to present a broader and clearer picture of a problem. Importantly, the solution to the problem is seldom so simple as deriding its sources. A piece of logic, and a piece of writing, should present a possible solution that’s more inventive and thoughtful than outright rejection. Engaged logic produces nuanced suggestion.
From my perspective, Bellafante’s proposition that “privilege hears you” and that this is a relatively new feature of privileged spaces is undeniably true. This is a shift in perspective in education that is less recent than one might imagine: this attentiveness to student and stakeholder opinion is connected to the rise in attention to and research in what’s called, in the field of Education, Social Emotional Learning (SEL). Before privileged schools even had offices of Diversity or DEI or DEIB/J, they embraced this subfield of research which suggested strong positive learning outcomes in classrooms where students’ needs and desires shaped instruction. Depending on the history, geographic location, and leadership of private schools, this infusion of SEL frameworks began either in the early 00s, in 2020, or somewhere in between. The philosophy that “we hear you” became de rigeur only recently. Many alums, and even some teachers, share Bellafante’s sneer toward it.
My response is simple: schools started to take on this approach because the research is very convincing. Reasons to pay attention to it vary depending on context, geographic location, and leadership, and those differences also explain the varied timing of its implementation. I’ve implemented responsive approaches to my teaching since I started in the classroom eight years ago, and I continually work to imagine and implement new strategies for responsiveness not only as a teacher but also as an advisor and school citizen. The results are always positive: they lead to student engagement, enhanced trust between me and my students, and overall higher academic performance.
Responsiveness can also lead to dilemmas and even identity crises within schools. Because responsiveness often requires schools to face down their traditions and procedures, it can really feel like a threat to a community’s identity. It doesn’t have to. Responsiveness that is bounded, purposeful, and student-centered usually, in my experience, leads to a richer community connection, not a weaker one. For example, when students challenge the efficacy or value of a student uniform, they’re not asking adults to scrap all discipline from their lives. Most of my students actually like when adults put structures in place. What they’re doing is asking for a reason “why”: they’re asking for us to provide the kind of robust logic that we ask them to practice in our classrooms. That’s a good thing.
Responsiveness is neither a threat to privileged spaces nor a unique feature of them. We’re only really paying attention to it because it’s a new combination, one that can feel as unusual as the peanut butter and bacon trend from a few years back. Why would a place that prides itself on exclusion try to brand itself around welcoming everyone’s voice? It is, without a doubt, ironic. To my mind, privileged schools’ focus on a responsive approach demonstrates the ways in which they’re influenced by the good work of other communities. This tipping balance is good for both the schools and the other communities.
As a product of privileged academic environments, I’ve seen and been made uncomfortable by the ways that people who didn’t share that experience can idolize them. For a long time, private schools have been idealized. Recognizing that private schools are influenced by other spaces means recognizing that this balance is shifting: private schools aren’t “the best” at caring for kids anymore. I call this a positive shift because it’s not really a change in perspective but an acknowledgment of a fact that’s been true longer than most of us care to admit.
Great education isn’t the unique purview of a private school, nor is it guaranteed within a private school. Where hearing the students may now be a trapping of privileged environments, it’s not a unique feature: hearing others and hearing kids is an option that’s available to anyone, and it’s been implemented to great success in public schools, charter schools, parochial schools, religious communities, sports teams, and other communities for generations. What private schools are doing now is recognizing a best practice that has never been the purview of the rich and privileged. By priding themselves on their responsiveness and talking about it all the time, private schools are actually acknowledging their belatedness: they’re relatively late to the party.
Theologian Simone Veil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” From where I sit, schools’ generosity toward their students, families, and staff shouldn’t be a cause for derision but a cause for celebration. So what if it stirs the pot?