Should Fear be the Basis of Decision-making in Schools?

Today is our first day of school…online. And I couldn’t be more excited. Today marks the beginning of the end of traditional approaches to education. Tradition isn’t dead, but it is dying. I think we all know this.

But just as we launch our online learning, behind the scenes we are planning for our physical school re-opening. We don’t have a date or an hour, but we are gathering as much data as possible to get students onto campus, safely.

Safety as a primary driving force of education is an odd value to prioritize. In fairness, safety has always been a value but it’s about avoidance–avoidance of loss of life from bullying, drugs, guns, and fires. Lawsuits, mainly, from families because safety is a foundational concern for all our loved ones. But attempting to design our schools’ reopening through the lens of infectious disease protocols terrifies me. Why? Because we haven’t thought these fully through. We are thinking from a very short-term stance and not thinking about the long-term implications. The emotional and intellectual impact of having to teach in fear of disease. Really this fear is bigger than that–it’s the fear of living. This is what CoVid has cultivated in our society as we consider “measured risks” whenever we leave our homes. In the back of our minds, we have to consider if whatever we are going to do is worth dying for.

What a pathetic point of view to make important decisions through.

I am reminded of this quote that rather captures the sentiment of where most schools stand when considering our physical school re-opening:

Soltionitis is the propensity to jump quickly on a solution before fully understanding the exact problem to be solved…When decision makers see complex matters through a narrow lens, solutionitis lures them into unproductive strategies…solutionitis is a barrier to improvement in practice.
From Learning to Improve: How American’s Schools Can Get Better by Bryk, Gomex, Grunow, and LeMahieus

As I listen to architects’ plans of how we can conduct “social distancing” in person, I look at those models and it feels completely Draconian to me. So as teachers perform amazing acts of transformation with their pedagogy online, we have this opposing force happening on our campuses: lining up rows of desks, installing plexiglass between us, constructing cohorts of students to herd, putting down signage and floor markings in order to conduct the flow of traffic and deciding if we should have children playing on the playground.

It feels like a rubberband–there is this amazing force being created as we pull back our instructional practices and upgrade our use of technology as a transformational tool in learning. But there is a counterforce that we have to consider when we “snap back” into face-to-face instruction with all these social distancing measures that are fear-based.

We have to really think clearly about the impact of all of this. Not from a myopic view of “safety” but a broader view that includes student agency, innovation, and creating a more just society.

This post doesn’t have any answers to this conundrum but you can be damned sure I am thinking about. I think we all should in education.