The private school down the street from our house is very good at advertising exactly why it’s awesome. They have a beautiful, comprehensive website and a big canvas banner outside the sprawling campus that reads:
“Park Day prepares students to be informed, courageous, and compassionate people who shape a more equitable and sustainable world.”
It also has a tall 10-foot fence and a gate that opens and closes when parents drive in to drop their children off. My daughters and I sometimes catch a glimpse of the chickens wandering around inside and what looks like a super fun playground. Someone once tried to get us the code but we were told there was a crackdown after too many neighborhood kids found their way in. It costs $25,790 a year for kindergarten.
.. If you’re trying to decide where to send your kid to school, it’s pretty logical to ask yourself: what might my kid gain from going to the most highly rated school in town? That school is, very likely, really good at answering that — whether it’s public or private.
.. If you are trying to be socially-conscious, you might even ask yourself: what do other kids lose if my kid doesn’t go to the neighborhood, public school
.. Those kids lose the friendship that your kid might offer, and in a roundabout way, the whole system loses out on your family’s energy, loyalty, and resources. The “public” part of public schools gets eroded when too many parents get understandably seduced by the places with the pithy taglines and the great websites.
But let’s flip the script. Let’s explore a different question: what do white and/or economically privileged kids gain from living in diverse neighborhoods and going to their local, public schools?
.. The most critical reason to send your privileged kid to public school: integrity. If you believe in the common good, of which public schools are the most fundamental building block this country has to offer, then participating in that system makes good sense.
.. Contributing through your attention and cultural capital, offering up your most precious resource — your love for your child — and letting that love expand and benefit a bunch of kids who are also deeply loved by their parents, but quite possibly, not in a position to forgo the failing, neighborhood school — well, it’s aligned. It feels right.
The modern American culture of parenting would lead you to believe that you can’t prioritize the common good and your own child at the same time — that the only way to be an excellent parent is to get the measurable best of everything for your child, which inherently means turning a blind eye to what other people’s kids endure. What if, instead, what is healthy for your child — not “best,” but healthy — is to receive no end of love and only proportional resources, and to witness parents trying to fumble their way toward closing the gap between their values and their actions each and every exhausting day?
A related, foundational reason: equality. Our public schools perpetuate racism and classism more systematically and effectively than almost any other institution we’ve got in this country. If you want to fight white supremacy and the legacy of slavery, public schools are a decent place to start.
.. Shannan Martin and her husband both grew up in small towns, heavily influenced by their all-white Evangelical Church. “We thought our duty was to live as safe and protected a life as possible,” she explains. But when they moved to Goshen, Indiana — the RV capital of the world — they decided to enroll their three children in a Latinx-majority public school, despite their neighbors’ warning. She explains: “We sent our kids to a ‘failing’ elementary school where, they told us, there would be drugs, evolution, gay people, and gangs.”
“It is the best thing that ever happened to us. I cringe to know how much a part of the problem I once was,” she says.
“I can only hope I continue to grow in ways that grind my old paradigms into dust. We have been here long enough to wake up to the overwhelming goodness of being part of a rich and diverse community. We understand our presence here does not enhance the lives of those around us nearly as much as their presence enhances our lives.”
Your kid doesn’t just learn diversity, but lives diversity.
Minorities will be the source of all of the growth in the nation’s youth and working age population, most of the growth in its voters, and much of the growth in its consumers and tax base as far into the future as we can see.”
.. demographics are going to shift dramatically; the flow of actual power — economic and political, especially — out of white, male hands may take longer. Even so, white children raised in white dominant spaces are inherently less equipped for the workforce, not to mention world, that they are entering into
.. The rise of artificial intelligence will also mean that so-called “soft skills” — like getting along with a wide range of humanity — will become more and more critical. Our children, particularly our white children, will be deeply disserviced if they come of age in segregated enclaves that teach them about racial difference without giving them the opportunity to actually live with and among those racially and culturally different from them. They will be less effective communicators, collaborators, inventors, and artists. They will be less wise and generous citizens and neighbors. In a world increasingly intolerant of white obliviousness and fragility, they will be set up for a kind of social and emotional failure.
.. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
.. Whiteness is often treated as a default state, rather than an actual culture in and of itself.
.. Kids who grow up in multiracial environments are more likely to be aware of how white culture shapes them, and have some valuable perspective on selectively adopting or rejecting it.
You and your kid get to be part of a community with non-white values.
.. One of the dominant norms of white privileged culture, in its contemporary form, is an emphasis on independence and a very particular and narrow kind of excellence.
Our favorite parenting books are filled with advice about how we might shape our children into high achievers.
We even plaster this ideology on our bumpers: “My kid is an honors student.” The dark side of all of this opportunity and emphasis on “winning” is that a lot of kids are left feeling like losers; sometimes to the point of questioning their own intrinsic worthiness.
What if your kid isn’t an honors student? What if your kid has a learning disability, but is an awesome gymnast or the kind of person who really senses when people are upset and knows how to help them out of a funk? There are no grades or bumper stickers for that.
Schools that aren’t majority white are, according to dozens of emails I received from parents, far more welcoming of kids who don’t fit a traditional mold.
As any parent of a child with special needs will tell you, most schools with high test scores aren’t thrilled to hear that our kids will be attending their schools. They don’t like the fact that our kids bring extra work.”
.. “These are schools that don’t have the money that our schools in the suburbs have, but they promote an inclusive environment for all students, which is worth far more to us in the long run,”
.. “I’ve gotten gasps and shocked looks when I tell people where I’m sending my son to school. I just smile and say that a school that can see the value my child adds to a class and that is willing to educate him fully alongside his peers, with the accommodations he needs, is the best school for him, regardless of location.”
.. One of her children needed to get pulled out of class regularly for speech therapy. Worried, Maggi asked the counselor if she should anticipate him getting teased and what she might do to prepare him for that. The counselor didn’t skip a beat before responding: “At this school? No—there is no normal here, so there’s no teasing kids who are different. The kids are used to everybody being unique.”
.. The teachers get to explore a wider range of teaching methods, too, according to Anne Kelterborn, an educator in Red Bank, NJ. She explains: “I have taught in both urban and suburban schools, and I have found that the ‘struggling urban’ schools tend to embrace far more creative and committed educators than in suburban schools.”
.. Amy Wheedon, of the D.C. area, felt like the parent association was a gauntlet of sorts at her kids’ mostly white elementary school. “Parents competed to lead new initiatives,” she explains. At their far more multiracial middle school, things are different: “Parents come out to celebrate their kids—at games, banquets and honor roll assemblies. Their jobs are tough enough; they aren’t looking for other ones. They want to leave work and have fun and spend time with their kids.
.. The economic pressure is often lessened in less white-dominant spaces. Krista Dutt, whose white kids attend a majority-minority school in the Chicago-area, explains, “We barely make ends meet, so being in a school and a neighborhood that people are surviving, not trying to beat each other at making the best birthday party, the best Valentine’s, or trying to prove that they don’t need the village is really great.”
You and your kids get practice being uncomfortable.
A more accepting school community, of course, doesn’t mean that your kid won’t experience discomfort. In fact, they will probably experience discomfort so often that they will get better and better at not just enduring it, but learning from it.
.. MLK day went for her kindergarten-age son. During a talk about the civil rights era bus boycotts, he excitedly shouted, “I would have gotten to sit in the back of the bus?!”
.. Her daughter, one of only a handful of non-native Spanish speakers in her Spanish honors class, came home and reported that none of her peers were giving her the time of day. “They thinks I’m just a basic white girl,” she told her mom.
As any mother would, Alison felt protective, but she also recognized that this was a defining moment: “For an hour a day, she knows what it is like to be in the minority, to find the rules confusing and feel like you’re a step or two behind, perhaps being judged and laughed at,” Alison explains. “I think most parents want to avoid that situation for their kids, but I think it’s a really important one.”
Alison told her daughter: “Be friendly, be yourself, be open about your life.”
After a few weeks, she started sharing stories around the dinner table about moments in her Spanish class when she got another student to laugh. It sounds small, but it’s actually big. Alison’s daughter doesn’t have to make a big empathic leap to understand what it feels like to be the minority in a given group of people. She’s lived it. She’s coped with it. She’s less likely to take her own sense of belonging for granted or to be oblivious when someone else is feeling isolated.
.. kids who see qualities as things that can be developed, rather than traits that you either possess or don’t, tend to thrive.
.. A white kid with a growth mindset around race knows that discomfort is a good sign of learning; they don’t fall apart at the first sign of confusion or critique.
In contrast, white kids who have been educated in perfectionist, homogenous environments and rarely weathered discomfort are likely to have a fixed mindset towards race. They are more interested in winning social entrepreneurship awards, than becoming wiser within unlikely, sometimes challenging, and deeply rewarding relationships.
Parenting, as it turns out, is a fairly new framework for what those of us with kids are up to. The term didn’t even exist until the latter half of the twentieth century, when upwardly mobile Americans started living in a more atomized way, separate from grandparents and aunts and uncles. Prior to that, caring for children was something that a wide range of people did, including older siblings and cousins. There wasn’t such a sense of needing to “do it right” by reading the right books, eating the right foods, saying the right things, and yes, getting into the right schools.
.. Alison Gopnik, a psychology and philosophy professor, points out that many of us — particularly white and privileged people — now approach the role of raising humans like carpenters. In short, we try to carve them into our own image of what a successful adult looks like. Her suggestion? Think of yourself more akin to a gardener — you create the right conditions and let nature do the rest.
.. If you send your kid to a school where they are surrounded by other kids quite unlike them — racially, culturally, religiously, socio-economically — you are providing a pretty rich and interesting ecosystem within which they can grow. Gardens, like communities, are healthiest when they’re diverse. If you plant your kids in a monoculture, expect less richness.
It was a beautiful fall day. My then kindergarten-age daughter, Thea, discovered that a few of her school friends were at our neighborhood park — Chelina from Cambodia, Yosselin from Guatemala, Devina and Tazaiah, both African American. They were lost in play for nearly two hours. On our walk back home, I said to her, ‘You know, Thea, these friends at the park — your friends from school — may have been coming to the park for years, like when they were 3 and 4 years old and when you were 3 and 4, too. But you didn’t know them then because you didn’t go to school with them. Isn’t that crazy?’
My daughter, who is very nurturing and loves her friends, responded, “But I would be sad if they weren’t my friends.”
I said, “But you wouldn’t be sad, because you wouldn’t know them.”
Thea said, “But I would still be sad.”
All Reality Is Interaction: Carlo Rovelli
what’s there instead, as you say, is “a world of happenings, not of things.”
MR. ROVELLI: Yes, a thing is something which remains equal to itself. A stone is a thing because I can ask where the stone is tomorrow, while a happening is something that is limited in space and time. A kiss is not a thing, because I cannot ask, where is a kiss, tomorrow; “Where is this kiss?” tomorrow. I mean, it’s just happened now.
MS. TIPPETT: I see.
MR. ROVELLI: And I think that we don’t understand the world as made by stones, by things. We understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses — [laughs] happenings. In other words, the elementary quantities or ingredients for describing the world are not things which remain through time; they are just limited in space and time. And I think which remain through time are processes that repeat themselves. A stone is just a common flickering of electrons and things and stuff, which remains together — not even forever, of course, because it goes into powder for a long time, for a while. So to better understand the world, I think, we shouldn’t reduce it to things. We should reduce it to happenings; and the happenings are always between different systems, always relations, or always like a kiss, which is something that happens between two persons.
MS. TIPPETT: So even, for you, a stone is a happening — seen with a long expanse of time and an understanding of how it became what it is, it’s a happening, not a thing.
MR. ROVELLI: We live 100 years, but suppose we lived a billion years. A stone would be just a moment in which some sand gets together and then it disaggregates, so it’s just a momentary getting-together of sand. The permanence of things is — it’s a matter of the — we look at them for a short time, with respect to their own staying-together.
MS. TIPPETT: I want to read another passage from your writing: “A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space, even when it seems that nothing is there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountain, woods, and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars.” [laughs]
.. But let me tell you something which I think is central. You quoted a sentence by — a phrase by Einstein in which he says that time is a sort of stubborn, persistent illusion, and it doesn’t exist. Einstein wrote that, but he wrote that in a letter addressed to the sister in the family of his best friend, Michele Besso, who had just died.
MS. TIPPETT: I did not know that.MR. ROVELLI: Yes, so this is not in a text to physicists or to philosophers. It’s in a letter to a sister who has just lost her brother, a family who has just lost a member of the family. So the content is not a discussion about the structure of reality. It’s a letter to console. It’s a letter in which Einstein expresses his love of Michele, who has been his companion. And in that phrase, Einstein writes, “For people like Michele and me, time is.” So he’s talking about his relationship with Michele, and he’s talking, clearly, about his own loss of Michele and his own being in front of death, because Einstein died one month and a little bit after Michele. So it’s very close to Einstein’s death, and when he’s saying, “There is something illusory in time,” I think he’s talking about emotions, and he’s talking about something, in a sense, deeper and more important than the physical nature of time. He’s talking about the illusion of life, of our experiences. I don’t think that phrase by Einstein should be taken too literally.
MS. TIPPETT: So in a sense, what you’re saying, also, is that it’s partly Einstein pointing at this challenge of working with time as we understand it scientifically, and time as we understand it as human beings? Or simply being — are you saying he’s really just — he’s being a human being there? [laughs]
MR. ROVELLI: I think he’s, in that phrase, is deeply being a human being and talking about his love with Michele and also, implicitly, talking about his own attitude towards death, which was coming; a month later, he’s dead. But certainly, time is something which touches us in death, profoundly, because it’s a — thinking about time is thinking about our finitude. We’re not going to live forever, and what is this time in which we are immersed? There’s no time on a fundamental level, and nevertheless, we human beings live in time. We live in time like fish in the water. For us, it’s impossible to think of ourselves without time. So I do think there is more to understand there, and I do think it’s a different question — what is time, in the fundamental level of physics? — from the question, what is time, for us? And for us, it touches a lot of things, including emotional things.
.. MS. TIPPETT: I wonder how — if it’s possible to briefly just describe what time is, for you, as a physicist.
MR. ROVELLI: A fantastic problem to work upon. [laughs] It’s something which — first of all, it’s not a single notion. It’s not “either there is time, or there is no time.” It’s what we mean by “time.” When we think about time, for instance, we think time is the same for everybody. And we know it’s not true, Time passes a little bit faster in the mountain and a little bit slower near the sea; the more high you go, the more time passes fast. So it’s relative to how we move, where we are, and so on. I think that, in the fundamental equation of the world as we have understood so far, we can forget about time. They’re not about how things evolve in time. It is about relations between — within variables. I think, that, more or less, we can understand.
.. So here’s one very intriguing thing you say — again, as a physicist — to the question of what explains that, for us, time seems to pass, or to “flow.” And you say, you believe this is connected to the “connection between time and heat” — that the “difference between past and future exists only when there is heat.” That is such a baffling and fascinating idea. Can you just explain that a little bit?
MR. ROVELLI: Oh, yes. Oh, this is something that, curiously, has not been said enough, and the known physicists don’t know it; but it’s not something new, and it’s something well-established. In fact, since not the last century but the previous century, every time we give a description of the world, of phenomena where there is no heat, we cannot distinguish the past from the future. Every time there is something that distinguishes the past from the future, there is heat.
So take a movie or something, and you run it backward. Imagine you take a movie of the moon going around the earth. You run it backwards, and you see a moon going around the earth the other way. It’s completely consistent with the laws of physics, and there’s no heat there. But if you throw a pen on the table, and it stops, and you take a movie of that, if you run the movie backward, you see something totally absurd — a pen that starts moving from nothing; and in fact, when the pen stops, it heats the table because there’s friction, and there is heat. So only when there is some heat around, the phenomena are different in one direction of time from the other. So the direction of time is deeply connected to the existence of heat. That doesn’t explain the direction of time but is a first step toward understanding it. The direction of time has to do with the presence of heat.
.. MR. ROVELLI: I think our own experience of the world — our thinking, our being, our emotions — are so much produced by our brain, our body, which are full of heat, [laughs] a deeply thermodynamical thing, so we cannot get out from this presence of heat when we think about our experience. When you think, your brain produces heat. When you wake up in the morning, your body produces heat. When you have an emotion, there is heat producing. And so we, in our experience, are children of the presence of heat in the world. I think that in a world completely without heat, we wouldn’t make sense. We wouldn’t be able to think. We wouldn’t have memory. Memory requires heat.
.. Physics struggles to give an objective picture of reality, as much as possible, which is very fine, very good. So it’s reality as seen from the — as much as possible, from the outside. But if you look from the outside, you always miss something, which is the perspective from the inside.
If you have a map of a region, and you want to use it, you want to know where you are in the map. So you need extra information, which is where you are. And there are words like “here,” like “me,” that have a meaning that depends on who says it. If I say, “I’m Carlo,” it’s true, but if you say, “I’m Carlo,” it’s false; so, the same sentence depends on who’s saying. So I think there is an aspect of reality which is strongly connected to its relational aspect. We perceive reality not from the outside, but from the inside. And there is a little difference between each one of us, obviously, and we have to keep this into account. And I think, keeping this into account, it’s one of the ingredients for making sense of what time is — and maybe, also, one of the ingredients [laughs] of learning how to deal with one another a little bit better — by remembering that we always have perspective on things, and everybody has a slightly different perspective than everybody else.
.. I don’t think that I, as a person, exist without the rest. I am my friends, my love, my enemies — everything that I interact with. All my ideas come from things I’ve read, I’ve talked, which are all interactions. And all of what I do is interacting with the rest. And the same is true for communities. Communities are what they are because they’ve been strongly influenced by different communities, [laughs] and they’re going to influence other communities, and so on and so forth. This, I think, is not proof of anything, but this, I think, it’s going to help us if we digest that instead of going in the direction of defending us from the others.
.. The world is much more complex than what it looks at first sight. I look at this glass of water, and it’s just quite transparent, but I know that, in fact, it’s a crazy zig-zagging of molecules down there, which do all sorts of stuff, and how fast they move the temperature, and so on and so forth. And this complexity, which is at all levels, guards us from being driven by too-simple-minded things.
Nature, Joy, and Human Becoming: Michael McCarthy
It was the way in which, at the age of seven, in a time of great trauma in my family, I personally became attached to nature. And this was a day in August, 1954, when my mother had gone away to hospital because she’d had a mental breakdown, and my brother, who was a year older than me, was completely mortified. He was terribly, terribly upset, and yet, I felt nothing whatsoever, which took me 50 years and a certain amount of psychotherapy to discover why.
And we went to my aunt’s in a nearby suburb of the town where I grew up, which was greener than our house, which had been in the inner city, and there was a garden, two doors away. And over the wall of this garden hung a buddleia bush. And in those days, when wildlife was far more numerous in the U.K., as indeed all around the world, than it is now, on the first morning, as I ran out into the road to play, this bush was just simply covered in butterflies. And it was, very particularly, very colorful ones, the most colorful of all the British butterflies, four of them, in particular — the peacock, the red admiral, the small tortoiseshell, and the — what’s the other one? Vanessa cardui. And I was very taken by them. I was lost in contemplation of them. I thought they were remarkable. And it was a time when I should have had terrible feelings, but I had no feelings, and the feelings for the butterflies filled this hole, as it were. And from that moment on, I began to love the natural world, albeit in fairly strange circumstances.
.. But it all came crashing down in 1982, when I was 35, because my mother died at the age of 68, and I found, then, to my absolute amazement, that I could not mourn her and that, just as I felt nothing when she went away in 1954 when I was seven, now, when she went away forever, I couldn’t feel anything either. And I did not know how to react to this; it was — to have your grief taken away from you is a very, very strange situation.
And I came to understand what had happened, and the fact was that when my mother had gone away when I was seven, I had hated her for that. I had hated her because she hadn’t said farewell to us or anything like that; she’d just gone away and left me, although my psyche did not allow me to admit that, so it turned into indifference. And similarly, when she went away forever, when she died, the same feeling kicked in. I hated her because she had gone away again. I hated my mother because she was dead. And these are the sorts of tangled bits of your psyche that psychotherapy — which has lots of critics, but sometimes can help you actually sort out, and it did in my case. And so I was greatly thrilled to have recovered my feelings for my mother and to have understood what happened in my childhood, which had seemed so confused.
But I had no way of marking that. I didn’t have a way of commemorating this really big thing in my life. We like meaning-making, don’t we; that’s why we have ceremonies. We have ceremonies for christening; most of all, we have ceremonies for marriage, and we have ceremonies for funerals. We don’t let people be buried or cremated, just like that. We want to have some sort of solemnity, some sort of meaning-making. But I did not have one.
.. MS. TIPPETT: You do, of course, realize how — that the metaphor there, the allusion of that love for your mother and where we come from and how we can’t feel our grief at the loss of our insects and our birds and our blossoms, it’s — I don’t know; I hear it now more, having you tell the story, than I did when I read it, even.
MR. MCCARTHY: I hadn’t — I think, instinctively, but I didn’t make the explicit connection. I’ll make it now that you say it.
Introducing The On Being Project
I feel like the world has changed so much. So, in the mid-’90s, late-’90s, having been a journalist, coming out of divinity school — so this was the Moral Majority — this was this moment where a lot of very loud, strident religiosity had claimed its place and was everywhere. And actually, religion was in the headlines. And then, in the years I was creating the show, we went through September 11. We had an evangelical president in the White House. So there was a lot of religiosity in the headlines, and a lot of new curiosity about it, but also, a lot of religious people getting quiet because they didn’t want to be associated with —
MS. PERCY: With the loud voices.
MS. TIPPETT: And journalists, I felt, colluding with handing over the microphones and cameras to the loudest voices.
MS. PERCY: What time period would this be? This is the early 2000s?
MS. TIPPETT: This would be like mid- to late-’90s…
MS. PERCY: Got it.
MS. TIPPETT: …and then, into the turn of the century. And I just felt that this is such an important part of life, this huge part of life which we call religion — where religion happens, spirituality, moral imagination, and that we didn’t have any places where we were talking about the sweep of that. And even when these voices hit the news, you didn’t get the spiritual content of this part of life, much less the intellectual content of this part of life, and the nuance and really, the breadth of the ways this is lived. And so that was my desire, to do that, and I thought public radio would be a place to do that.
But I think what we started doing, from the very beginning, was drawing out a different kind of conversation, voices that weren’t being heard. It was very focused on religion per se, and then we moved through the backlash to that, which is what I think the New Atheist was, New Atheist movement. What was interesting to me about all of that, this kind of very strident anti-religion — coming through all of that, this new conversation that’s happening across these lines; across religious lines, across boundaries of religious and non-religious, all kinds of scientific inquiry, and theology and spiritual inquiry. And so, when you ask me what this is and what it’s become, it’s been so fluid and evolving.
.. here we are in 2018, in a fractured world, in a hurting world — and yet, we’re in this moment of passage, and we’re in this moment of generational change. And I think we’re in a moment where there’s huge culture shift happening, and right now the destructive aspects of that are really on display and better-covered; but there’s a lot that’s new that’s being created; there’s a lot of denial that’s dying. There’s a lot of generative possibility and people living into it, and I think the Impact Lab is just gonna equip us that much more intentionally and practically to meet that.
.. we’re really exploring this, in some ways, very old-fashioned word of “formation,” of becoming the kind of people that we are meant to be, in some way; that we are called to be, especially in this moment, and thinking about what are the spiritual technologies that can help us develop those virtues.
MS. TIPPETT: And a way of even being with strangers.
MR. TER KUILE: Absolutely. We had these long tables where people sat down at meals, and it made me realize, dinner is one of our spiritual technologies.
.. MS. PERCY: I love that you mention, Erinn, two things, which is hospitality and, also, community. As a Hispanic person, that is the tenets of being Hispanic, is — eating, as well; so it’s community, hospitality, and food. But I think those are two key things to everything that we do at The On Being Project. And community, in particular, is something that I feel so proud of, that we engage with our community in the way that we do.
.. Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche. And somewhere he writes that if a community is only for itself, it will die — which I thought was so striking, because I think that’s one of the things that I’m most passionate about, as we think about building community and building relationships, is that it isn’t just for itself; it’s for a world transformed in some way.