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.

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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 

Collective compassion over mé féinism

We were just informed of this article titled “Our children are at grave risk of COVID as State puts profit ahead of public health,” written by Irish journalist Tess Finch-Lees at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall. Doubly unfortunate is that pleas to protect children in schools continue to be ignored. In it she says:

“I’ve been scouring the web to see if any school has managed to prevent outbreaks. I found one – Abrome, in Texas. How did it do it? By ignoring politicians and following the science.

“Acknowledging Covid is airborne, mitigations included daily testing, mandatory FFP2/3 masks indoors and outdoors in close contact during surges, distancing, remote learning when cases were extremely high, outdoor learning options, and Hepa filtration in every classroom. If CO2 readings exceeded 800, rooms were evacuated and classes continued in sheltered outdoor spaces, also used for eating. Everyone is vaccinated.

“Abrome’s ethos is that of inclusion. A Covid-safe school is accessible to everyone. The sense of collective compassion over mé féinism.

“In the same way I would challenge institutional racism, I won’t participate in a system that discriminates against disabled, clinically vulnerable children and those with clinically vulnerable family.” 

1. we appreciate that some folks recognize that in a landscape where an extremely tiny minority of institutions are protecting people from COVID transmission, that Abrome’s COVID protocols provide an accessible alternative to school for those who are at risk of serious illness from COVID (although it should be noted that everyone is potentially at risk).

2. the sense of collective compassion over mé féinism extends beyond the walls of Abrome. We are members of adjacent and broader communities and we recognize our responsibility to not do harm to those communities.

3. we agree that people should seriously interrogate their participation in oppressive institutions.

—
Featured image by cartoonist Graeme Keyes from the online article.

Educators need to break some laws

Overtly political post here.

We need to learn how to navigate the world we live in, but we should also try to live in a way that allows for the creation of a better world. Laws are rarely enacted for ethical or moral reasons. They are most commonly enacted to take or preserve power. That is also why laws are arbitrarily, selectively, and disproportionately enforced; with the impact of that enforcement falling most heavily on the most historically marginalized and oppressed peoples.

Some laws need to be broken.

One year into “pandemic schooling”; let’s never return to normal

One year ago today, on March 30, 2020, we ‘returned’ remotely after an extended three-week spring break that allowed us time to better understand the threat of the burgeoning Covid-19 pandemic. Given the rapid spread of the disease; concerns of medical systems being overwhelmed; the ballooning number of heartbreaking stories of harm in places as unfamiliar and familiar as Central China, Northern Italy, Iran, and New York City; and the uncertainty about the longer term effects of the disease on those who survive; we realized that we could not wait around for local, state, or federal agencies to determine our response to the pandemic. 

At Abrome, we have always sought to center the needs of those most impacted when making decisions. While that most obviously meant that we would need to prioritize the wellbeing of the members of our community who were most at risk of serious illness from the disease, because we are all interconnected we would also need to concern ourselves with the impact of our decisions on broader society. In time, and unsurprisingly, it became apparent that in addition to the elderly and those with certain underlying medical conditions, the worst consequences of the disease disproportionately fell on Black, Indigenous, and people of color, as well as those without material resources. It was this expectation that led us to our April 1, 2020, decision to remain remote through the end of the 2019-20 academic year. 

In June we published a living contingency planning document that would uniquely allow us to be together more safely this 2020-21 pandacademic year. We took everything outdoors (in physically distant small groups, for three week cycles at a time). Because we are a Self-Directed Education community that has never been stuck to the practices and structures of schooling, we were able to transition to being fully outdoors rather seamlessly. As a result of our community's dedicated efforts (and some luck), one year in, no one in our extended community (Learners, immediate and extended families, Facilitators, housemates, and dedicated pod members) has contracted Covid-19.  

Now, as vaccinations roll out and as Covid-19 numbers trend down, it seems everyone wants to "return to normal." However, "normal" was never good enough. That "normal" prioritizes academics over relationships, and success over solidarity. It tends to have some combination of age segregation, forced curriculum, personalized learning apps, homework, testing, grades, and forced exhibitions (with some Covid-19 security theater sprinkled in); but what it has never had was a respect for the autonomy of children. "Normal" also ignores the cost of schooling on young people and on communities, especially during this pandemic.  

Our approach to the pandemic has been a continuation of what we have always done at Abrome--prioritize community care. We believe in the power of community, and centering the needs of the people most impacted is one of the hallmarks of a strong community. We are proud of the way we have put community over convenience, and people over profits during this pandemic. Post-pandemic, we will continue to reject the "normal."

——

Cover photo by Taylor Wilcox on Unsplash

Updated foreward to contingency planning document

Dear Abrome Learners and families, 

We published the first version of this contingency planning document on June 9, 2020. This document outlined our plan for how we could more safely be together during the pandemic, and allowed our community to have more certainty about what the 2020-2021 academic year would look like. It also made clear that we were going to place community care before convenience, and people before profits. We would err on the side of centering the needs of those people who were most at risk of serious illness or death: the elderly, those with certain underlying medical conditions, BIPOC communities, those without material resources.

Our approach to the pandemic set us apart. We took everything outdoors in small cohorts of Learners and Facilitators. We prevented cross exposure by keeping cohorts physically distant from each other, and never having siblings in different cohorts (no matter their ages). We also held firm to stage based standards for coming together, to include shutting down in-person meetups when we hit the highest risk stage level of the pandemic in January and February of 2021. And our focus on community care extended beyond Abrome--Facilitators, Learners, and family members were all asked to adhere to Covid-19 protocols at home, and to be transparent and honest about situations that could put others at risk of exposure.

The people who make up the community at Abrome are as unique as our approach to the pandemic. Everyone at Abrome fundamentally agrees that children and adolescents should have autonomy over their lives and that they should be treated as full human beings. They recognize that the most important things young people can learn are completely left out of schoolish curriculum, such as how to find meaning in the world, how to build relationships with others, how to manage conflict, how to discover their own interests and gifts, and how to be with and enjoy oneself. They also understand that building community and being in community with others is vital to human flourishing. 

There are not many parents and guardians who trust their children enough to allow them to experience Self-Directed Education in lieu of schooling in the best of times. And Abrome’s vigilant approach to protecting one another and the public during this pandemic shrunk that pool even further. But our collective focus on community care has allowed us to navigate this pandemic year in the most admirable of ways. Not only have we not had a single infection within our community (which means we have not contributed to the growth of the pandemic in any way), we have been able to support and hold one another through economic recession and hardship, an uprising centered on rejecting police brutality and racial injustice, right wing street violence and an attempted coup, and a debilitating winter storm that left millions without energy or water. 

The pandemic is not over. As of March 27, 2021, the national 7-day moving average of new cases and deaths were still over 60,000 and 1,000, respectively. While much of society is eager to “return to normal,” we recognize that “normal” was never good enough. We will be able to loosen protocols as vaccinations increase and when community spread becomes rare. Eventually, we will be able to come back together indoors, although it may be limited to vaccinated Learners at first. This continues to be a living document. Thank you for your continued vigilance, your concern for others in our community, and your concern for broader society.

With love and gratitude,
Antonio Buehler
March 28, 2021

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Cover photo by Natalie Pedigo on Unsplash