To stave off the terrible loneliness

WHEN ASKED "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

~ David Sedaris

I love this line from David Sedaris. 

Not gonna lie, being able to solve the Sunday NYT crossword puzzle is an impressive trick to show off. One does not need to spend 15,000 hours in school to get there though. Simply reading and being engaged in the world is a great, often better alternative.

But it is the end of the line that packs the punch. “To stave off the terrible loneliness.” We certainly have a loneliness problem in the US. One report suggests that 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children feel “serious loneliness.” 

Such widespread loneliness is not a feature of human existence, it is a feature of modern, schooled society, where young people are segregated from life and forced to compete against their peers on almost entirely useless tasks for 15,000 hours of their young lives, so that they can then compete against others in college, and then against more people in the workplace. 

Very few young people get to experience what community feels like, where the existence of others allows us to support and be supported. When young people are exposed to such environments they begin to value themselves and others simply for being, not for how they perform against others. And those young people are more likely to grow into adults who commit to cultivating communities of care. 

Community is an antidote to terrible loneliness. Schooling is not.

—

Cover photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

Friday, March 6, 2020.

Three years ago, today, Abrome broke for spring break not knowing if we would return when spring break was scheduled to end on March 23rd. News of a dangerous novel coronavirus left us debating what our options were given the responsibility we had to support the young people in our learning community, and the duty we had to protect them, their households, and the staff at Abrome. When it became clear that we would not be able to safely come back together, we extended spring break to three weeks. On March 30th we came back together remotely and stayed remote through the end of that first pandacademic year. 

It was a challenging time. We needed to find ways to get some Abromies reliable internet connections and devices to log in to our remote gatherings. And connecting with each other over video was difficult when we were used to meeting in person. We struggled financially because some families pulled their kids when we went remote. We worked hard to maintain a sense of calm assurance that we would all come through it together.

It was a scary time. There were people in our immediate community who were at high risk. There were elderly grandparents, two people living with cancer, multiple immunocompromised folks, uninsured people and others without access to quality health care, frontline essential workers, and members who were at risk of losing their homes if they could not work. We wanted to protect and support them, and while we could protect them in part by not meeting in person, could we really support them against the conditions of society that put them at increased risk?

It was also a hopeful time. We saw people staying home to protect others from disease. We saw people coming together to support one another through mutual aid efforts. Against the backdrop of illness and death, for a moment we saw people focused less on getting ahead by leaving others behind, and more on considering how they could help others survive. We saw people questioning the practices and structures of not only schooling, but of society, and some began to believe that they could alter or abolish those practices and structures. 

In that moment, when no one knew how the pandemic would play out, Abrome made a choice that was clear ethically, but murky from a business perspective. We reaffirmed our commitment to community care. Community care means centering the needs of those who would be most impacted by our decisions and actions, and leveraging our privilege to support them. It is easy to talk about centering the needs of others when the costs are low, or when it causes only a temporary inconvenience. It is another thing to do so when society demands that we turn away from those most impacted for our own benefit. Unfortunately, the moment of societal solidarity soon began to fall apart as the demands to turn away grew strong. We chose not to turn away. 

It is not preordained that “everyone will get it eventually.” We do not need to “learn to live with COVID.” Institutions are not powerless to stop the spread. We chose people over profits, and solidarity over enrollment. We chose to embrace a multi-layered approach to preventing the spread of COVID-19 that includes masking, physical distancing, filtration and ventilation, testing, and vaccination. Because of those efforts, and some luck, we have not had a single case of spread within our learning community. And our culture is stronger for it, even if our community is smaller—74% of lost enrollment since the pandemic began has due to our pandemic policies. 

Three years in, the pandemic continues. And we will continue to take it seriously because we are committed to community care.

—

Cover photo by Deborah Jackson from Pixabay

Will liberated youth choose to do nothing?

There is a belief among too many adults that young people, if given the opportunity to do nothing, will do nothing. It is based on an ageist, anti-youth, and often ableist mindset that children are flawed creatures and must be forced to work to overcome their inborn sloth. It is also untrue. No one is more eager to explore and learn than the youth.

A young Abromie facing away from the camera sits curled up on a yellow chair reading a graphic novel she checked out from the library. 

First, they are biologically wired to try to engage with the world and learn. The best thing adults can do is stop interfering in that natural inclination.

Two masked Abromies hanging out in the lounge playing a game of Uno. 

Second, they have less life experience so they are much more likely to find their experiences novel, and hence more likely to be excited to engage in it. Except when adults ruin it by mandating it, gamifying it, or testing it.

Third, to the extent that they do act “lazy” when given the freedom to play and learn, it is more often an inability of the adults to understand how young people learn outside of schools settings.

Finally, if they are truly slothful and want to do nothing, it is usually because they have expended too many cognitive resources performing for adults.

If adults want the young people to grow into grownups who are eager to engage with the world, to be lifelong learners, they would be wise to let the young people be free to play and learn, today.   

An Abromie, facing away, working with the Scratch programming platform for the first time.

A masked Abromie standing at a whiteboard working through some multiplication problems. 

Two masked Abromies in the kitchen working some flour for a cooking creation. 

Two masked Abromies facing the camera after they created a new dessert together. 

Why families choose the schools they choose

Families who have the means to do so will choose where to send their kids to school (public or private) based on a variety of factors such as price, proximity to home, average class size, education philosophy, clubs and extracurricular activities, and the colleges the school’s graduates get into. Families rarely get everything they want out of a school because many of their wants cannot coexist in a school setting. So, families are forced to prioritize their wants.  

But there is more to the decision process than where various schools land on each of the preferred factors. There is the motive behind sending a child to school in the first place. And that motive, for the great majority of people, almost always revolves around, “what school is going to do to make my child ‘successful’?” And success as measured by schools means testing and academic performance and sometimes college placement; and by society it generally means the prestige of the colleges and jobs the students end up gaining access to, as well as their potential future earnings. 

And because most families are members of dominant society, and are enculturated by it, their motivations and prioritized wants become a response to their own anxieties and notions of scarcity. They think in individual rather than collective terms. They focus on the “best” schools for their kids, choosing security over liberation, and what helps their kids get ahead even if it is at the expense of other kids or society. And the schools give them the assurances they need to keep the kids enrolled. And then, too often, the families bemoan the state of society. The same society their kids will grow old in.

Our recommendation: be different. 

“Even our supposedly "best" schools—maybe especially these most resourced, largely white schools—fail to give young people a chance to teach and learn the meaning, the responsibilities, and the demands of freedom. Schools serving the wealthy do the most extraordinary job teaching children to define success in individual rather than collective terms—to get ahead rather than to struggle alongside, to step on rather than to lift up. On any serious measure of practicing freedom, these would be the "failing" schools.”
~ Carla Shalaby 

Autonomy is not just about the individual

Youth autonomy is one of the core pillars of the Abrome community. It is not a talking point. All people should be able to choose how they use their time, have control over their bodies and minds, and have their boundaries respected. Children and adolescents are people, too.

Some people think that giving kids the choice of which learning app to use, or which character they want to represent on a project is autonomy. Others think it is having students ask the questions that will help structure the learning that they will be guided into next. But that is not autonomy, it is the illusion of choice.

Autonomy is much bigger than the pedagogical approach we take to education at Abrome. But fully supporting Self-Directed Education is certainly necessary if we are going to support the autonomy of young people. Young people do not have autonomy if they are made to focus on math or writing at certain times, or if they must perform for adults.

In order for the environment to support youth autonomy it is necessary to shift from thinking how adults should act on young people through manipulation, motivation, or coercion; to how adults can serve as allies to the youth and as partners in their journeys.

“[Youth] are only autonomous when their environment provides them with the space to freely explore and to use their agency to learn. Autonomy is therefore both about the person (who needs to feel that they have the power to change things) and their environment (which needs to give them the opportunity to do so).”
~Naomi Fisher from the book Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning