Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if
authorship is acknowledged]
From
time to time my blogs elicit comments and questions from readers. Most of the
time, the questions are personal and do not merit a public reply. But the other
day a reader asked:
Have COIVD-19 school closures or episodic interruptions from COVID-19 restricted the common ground that schools provide for interaction between different social groups? Do you believe that school closures and interruptions arising from COVID-19 will result in an erosion of social cohesion, diminishing the school’s contribution to keeping society on the same page?
My
reply:
People
learn who they are, to whom they are related, and the power they have from the institutions
with which they and their families are affiliated and the myths they are told.
Families, of course, are the first and most influential context for such
learning. Peers are influential, increasingly so as youngsters grow older.
Families
interpret the world for the young, communicating the possibilities open to them
and the limits on those possibilities. Families tell the young what they can
and cannot do based upon their experience. Most parents encourage their
children to aspire beyond the limits the parents faced and want their children
to have the advantages the parents did not have. “You can be anything you set
your mind on” is a common message to our children.
Families
are tribal. They also draw the lines between family members and those outside
the family. Tribalism, defence of the extended family, is a genetically
programmed response designed for its protection. For most of human history, the
tribal mechanism ensured survival in socially hostile environments. But
tribalism has its downside, too. In a socially diverse society, the
admonishment, “Don’t play with kids like that,” and the injunction to “Stick
with your own kind” establish the basis for discrimination and racism.
Religion,
media, and politics are essential parts of society, but they too are tribal.
They divide us along philosophical lines. The optimist in me would like to
believe that although we may differ philosophically, those differences are
equivalent pathways in the pursuit of common human needs and in accordance with
similar ethical principles. Increasingly hostile expressions of antipathy in recent
years, and especially during COVID-19, are eroding my optimism.
I
would like to think that most of us want Canada to be a more socially cohesive
and egalitarian society. We want our children to have a sense of who they are
as Canadians based upon shared values and want them to live in a society where
the similarities among us outweigh the differences, but one in which the
differences are respected.
Those
aspirations cannot be realized without an institution dedicated to helping us
to transcend our tribalism in order to live and work together. The only
institution I know that has the promise of doing that is the public
school. You will no doubt have noticed
that I used the word promise. While I think public schools do help us transcend
our tribalism, they are imperfect – so the promise is not completely fulfilled.
When
I think about the history of Canadian public schooling, I see improvement. The
overt appeals to xenophobia that were once common (“our Anglo-Saxon heritage”)
and the open denigration of Indigenous peoples – are diminished. Diminished,
but not extinguished. Vestiges of privilege and discrimination are baked into
the institution. Canada and its institutions are still settler-dominated.
I
am cautiously optimistic that the manifestations of privilege and
discrimination can be eliminated. I am not naïve, however. Eliminating them
will require significant, conscious, and persistent effort. Since most children
are in school at a point in their lives when tribalism is not so firmly
"baked in," public education is the only institution capable of
communicating the values I hope we share.
Schools
address the same tension between individual rights and the needs of the
collective that are present in the larger society. We cannot and should not
sidestep the tensions but work to prevent one set of values from eclipsing the
other.
It
is too soon to assess the long-term effects of COVID-19 closures, but the
effects should be assessed. There is a variety of sound tools to assess the
social climate of schools and a body of knowledge that can be called upon to
improve social relations among students.
Undertaking
such assessments and using the data to improve the social environment of school
is not a trivial undertaking. If public schools cannot help to create a
socially cohesive society, who or what can?