At the Center of All Possibilities

Richard Wilkinson, Stephen Bezruchka, Sandra Mathison, E. Wayne Ross, Jo Cripps, Peter Suruda, Don Fels, Jan Maher, Beto Gutierrez, Jerry Price, Debbie Reese, Jean Mendoza, Yves Salomon-Fernández, Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au, Alyssa Arnell, Leo Hwang, Linda McCarthy, Jack Schneider, Aji Piper, Greta Thunberg, Caroline Whitcomb. And thank you to Lang Walsh, Rebecca Timson, and Helen Britto.

Thank you to the good folks at Peter Lang: Shirley Steinberg, series editor, Patty Mulrane, who I think may work most all of the jobs there at once, Dani Green, who has taken the editing baton mid race, Jackie Pavlovic, Naviya Palani, the production team and all others involved in making this book happen.

And finally, love and thanks to Jan Maher, who over the course of these past 40 years together has made clear that I am not the only one who is brave and foolish. Thank goodness.

When youth activist Greta Thunberg was approached for her reaction/response to the report she replied there is nothing new here, it’s “merely confirming what we already know.” When Ms. Thunberg started her school strikes in 2018, attempting to convince the Swedish Parliament to take action to save the planet, people would ask her why she was striking.

Some people say that I should be in school instead. Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can “solve the climate crisis.” But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change. And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? And what is the point of learning facts in the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society. (Thunberg, 2018)

Greta Thunberg asks a fundamental question that informs this book. What is the purpose of school if what we know does not lead to action, if education does not lead to living healthier and more sustainable lives? How effective is our educational system if it leaves adults unwilling or unable to act in the face of imminent danger, be it climate change, a lethal virus (with large numbers refusing to take vaccines that would protect them and/or others), gullible enough to believe that Hillary Clinton and other liberals were running a child sex ring out of a non-existent basement in an obscure pizza parlor, or to believe a candidate who lost an election by more than seven million votes, and lost the electoral college by a substantial margin somehow won the election. The rhetoric linking the success or failure of our schools based on test scores widely misses the mark. If the purpose of education is to help the next generation learn what they need to learn to maintain and improve their lives and the lives of those in their community, then our educational system is failing miserably, and has been failing for many years.

The presence of the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the disparities of our society, and the failures of our institutions, including our educational system. We learned that some families, communities, and towns were and are relatively well equipped to deal with the dangers and challenges brought by the pandemic while a higher percentage of communities of color and communities living in poverty experienced death and/or serious illness, economic devastation, struggles to maintain housing and food security, and educational challenges as schooling went remote. None of this was a surprise to anyone paying attention; Covid has simply made it more difficult to ignore or hide the disparities in our increasingly unequal society. A character in Louise Erdrich’s novel The Plague of Doves observes that “What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.” We are very much in danger of having our increasing inequality become our entire history moving forward unless we act, unless we refuse to let this increasingly unsatisfactory present go on. The question is what, if anything are we willing to do about it, and what is (are) the most effective path(s) of action?

There is no agreement as to the answers to those questions, and I’ve seen very little active interest in considering them seriously, given the level and immediacy of the crises the schools are facing. Current educators, families and communities are too busy trying to survive to consider the fundamental changes those questions point to, and those in power, who run and profit from the system as it is, are in no hurry to bring drastic change that might threaten their positions of privilege. Thus, the push to get back to “normal,” to how things were before the pandemic sent us into quarantine.

But that’s not good enough. It will not move us closer to an equitable, just, sustainable society, and won’t help us to meet the true crises we are facing on virtually every level of our lives. We have to do better, and education has a critical role to play in bringing the fundamental change we need. That’s the subject of this book.