Embrace Paradox

In a recent open letter to the public, a local teacher in my region, Jennifer Bardell, sounded the alarm on the underfunded state of Quebec’s schools prior to recent strike action. She wrote: “You can choose to leave this in the already overflowing hands of teachers, but it is our children who will pay the ultimate price.” Yes. Teachers, and schools in general, are doing some seriously heavy lifting as the rate of technological and societal change dramatically increases. Pronouns and washroom signage? Cell phone use? Increasing polarization in society? Fentanyl-laced drugs? School staff are waist-deep in it all months or years before the rest of the culture and already calling the ambulances.  

I worked at a local high needs secondary school, both as a part of the guidance team and the teaching staff, over the course of the pandemic and beyond. I witnessed teachers not just attempting to impart passion for their subject matter, but also loving the young people in their care - many of whom are thirsting for sane, empathetic adults in their lives. These students drink in every bit of uncomplicated kindness they can get - whether from the lunchtime and afterschool clubs that teachers offer, the connections they work hard to make with students: throwing pizza parties at their own expense; remembering specific details about the students’ lives - in spite of often having 30+ students in each class; offering extensions on deadlines with compassion, and reaching out to the guidance team when they are concerned for a listless-seeming student. I saw kids blossom under the loving gaze and good humour of certain teachers. Kids who don’t have enough food at home soak up the concern of competent adults like warm rain. And don’t even get me started on the guidance teams in high needs schools - people who see how the worst of humanity’s desperate impulses are brought to bear on children. They stay hours late when kids have to be picked up by our even more beleaguered foster-care system. They sit with kids during ever-more-frequent panic attacks, breathing with them. And they are the front lines of the cutting, suicide-risks, and the “61% increase in emergency department visits and 60% increase in hospitalizations in Canada for mental disorders” between 2009 and 2019. 

The thing is, friends, education affects us all. Schooling, how it’s done, how it was conceived, and who it benefits are grave and vitally important questions for all of us, again, as Ms Bardell points out. And here, I’m broadening the narrative beyond the realms of teacher salaries and qualifications. Do you remember Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on shifting educational paradigms? He said (back in 2010) that “The current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age.” In short, our system of education was modelled according to the needs and interests of industrial capitalism and in its image: ringing bells, knowledge spliced into separate, measurable “subjects”, children grouped by age rather than skills or interests, etc. Most of us are so immersed in this style of education we can barely see it, and therefore accept it unquestioningly. And why bother to question it? It’s working well enough isn’t it? 

Modern schools reinforce some of the very same aspects of our culture that are leading us to the brink of what is being called the “metacrisis” by thought leaders (sounds about right doesn’t it?). For instance, schools rely on the notion of “one right answer,” arrived at separately, often denoted by filling in a circle on a standardized test with a time limit. We learn to condition our bodies to sit for long hours at a time at a desk, punctuated by rushing to another classroom at the ringing of a bell, at which time we must switch our thinking to whatever “subject” we are in, regardless of the present organic interests and motivations of our bodies and minds. We demand that kids do this approximately six times per day. It’s exhausting. It also trains us to believe that learning is hard, that it needs to be delivered to us by someone else, that one answer is “right,” and that we must compete with others to be the best in a system that is rigged to prioritize some subjects over others, based on the old Enlightenment idea of “Academic vs Non-Academic,” which, as Sir Ken Robinson points out, is a myth. And what’s the cost of this myth? Millions upon millions of young people leaving school believing that they’re less intelligent and entering young adulthood completely out of sync with their natural gifts. Might I remind you that humans are at our most innovative between the ages of 15-25. We are not in a time when we can afford to squander our innovative potential or the gifts of our young.

Our current system is in stark contrast to a view of learning that is based in global Indigenous traditions known as Restorative Justice. In this view of learning, we would learn to embrace paradox and divergent thinking, which is not just tolerated, but necessary to arrive at the best possible course of action or solution to a given problem. Collaboration is prioritized and reinforced, not just because “most great learning happens in groups” (another Robinson coinage), but also because of the belief that the world is profoundly interconnected. Restorative Justice also holds that we are holistic beings and that all gifts are needed. Imagine how we could transform schools based on these principles. Because school transformation is what our world needs. And this is not a criticism of our teachers or school administrators (embracing paradox remember?), who are doing their best in a system that is not designed to support how humans actually learn. Whose interests does it serve to maintain the status quo of schooling? As with every hierarchy, it serves the interests of the world as is - of those who currently hold power. 

I started by quoting Ms. Bardell in saying “You can choose to leave this in the already overflowing hands of teachers, but it is our children who will pay the ultimate price.” I would go further to say that it is both our culture and our hopes for the future that are suffering and will continue to as we think of the talent, creativity, and innovation we are squandering as we go about busily destroying our only home. Absolutely: it is an unfair burden to leave the state of our schools in the hands of already overwhelmed teachers and school administrators.

So what’s needed? We first need to acknowledge that schools, as currently conceived and implemented, are not bringing us closer to the world that will lead to our collective flourishing. And at the same time we can hold in our hearts that teachers and other school staff are working heroically in spite of a crumbling system. Then what I believe is needed is for us to journey to a different place together using the wide, solid bridge of restorative justice teachings as we rely on the divergent thinking of each one of us.