Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Preventing Grace

Home
Evangelical
Pro-Tip: At the Start of a New School Year, Don’t Play God

Pro-Tip: At the Start of a New School Year, Don’t Play God

Last updated on: August 31, 2021 at 6:29 am by Anne Kennedy

Pro-Tip: At the Start of a New School Year, Don’t Play God 2021-08-31T06:29:12-04:00 Anne Kennedy

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Me contemplating the new Scholastic Year

This is a pretty great piece of writing, full of cutting description and well-timed sarcasm. Very bracing for any day of the week. Here are some money quotes:

“There is no such thing as learning loss,” she [Myart-Cruz] responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even went so far as to suggest darkly that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.

So that is a curious idea. Also this:

In early March, when Newsom tried to coax teachers back into classrooms by dangling $2 billion worth of incentives for schools that reopened before April 1, Myart-Cruz dismissed his proposal as a boondoggle for wealthy neighborhoods and “a recipe for propagating structural racism.” As much of the rest of the state started bringing teachers and students back to campus full time, Myart-Cruz dug in, waiting until late April to only partly reopen for hybrid, part-time learning. When parents complained, pointing to the low incidence of COVID cases in schools that had fully reopened, Myart-Cruz dismissed their concerns as the product of their unexamined privilege.

Mmm, yes. I love the unexamined privilege trope:

“Are there broader issues at play? Yes, there are,” she says. “Education is political. People don’t want to say that, but it is.”

That I absolutely agree with. Education is political. It’s also spiritual, so that’s embarrassing. On we go:

“I love that my picture is the biggest one,” she said. “But here’s the trouble: You can recall the Governor. You can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?”

That seems to be a question that no one knows how to answer. And we continue:

Two new reports—from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and the education assessment group NWEA—show that in the past year of remote schooling, schoolchildren have fallen dramatically behind, and none more so than low-income and Black and brown kids whose parents lack the resources to create an adequate classroom learning environment at home. Keeping L.A.’s schools closed isn’t doing those communities any favors.

It’s so interesting, the interplay between things like “rights” and things like “favors.” I wonder, is it possible that everything is more complicated than it looks? Probably not:

Pitting white, wealthy neighborhoods against poorer, more ethnic ones isn’t exactly a recipe for social equanimity. On the contrary, it tends to breed suspicion, hostility, myopia, and paranoia. Last winter, for example, as protests mounted against Myart-Cruz’s handling of remote teaching, the union leader saw it as a racial attack, not an educational dispute. She posted an article to Facebook in which a school superintendent in Chicago charged that parents pushing to get kids back in the classroom were fueled by “white-supremacist thinking.” “Right on!” Myart-Cruz wrote approvingly, going on to claim that she and other UTLA staffers were being “stalked by wealthy, white, Middle Eastern parents.”

Then, apparently, she tried to find out the race of those people who were opposing her, and some of them were newly arrived from Afghanistan. Hashtag So Awkward. Anyway, that doesn’t matter nothing really matters:

“We’re reenvisioning what the future of public schools will look like,” she says with assurance. In the end, Myart-Cruz may not get everything she wants—not even UTLA is powerful enough to end the conflict in the Middle East or even raise taxes on the wealthy—but it’s abundantly clear from the last year and a half how far she’s willing to go to push her agenda.

Imagine, systems so perfect that everyone would just naturally be good:

“Cecily wishes the world could be more like a classroom where she could get people to break down the boundaries between them and make them into a community,” he says. “With her in charge.”

Mmm, I love the smell of hubris in the early morning. So anyway, I am about to start my own school year, and I’ve been wondering anxiously about how everyone in my town is doing as the long complications of a worldwide disease that seems to be morphing and changing continues to do that. The problem for all of us is that there is no ideal that we can reach. We can’t perfectly educate any child—no one can. Just when you think you’ve got something figured out, the child changes, or it turns out you were mistaken, or covid comes into the world and spoils everything.

What I like best about Christianity, for those who don’t know which way to turn, is that it does provide some helpful clarifications along the way. It can help you—like that vial of whatever it was that Galadriel bestowed Frodo that he kept forgetting about apparently until it was basically too late—think through all the bad options and pick the least bad one.

One of those helpful clarifications is the Render Unto Caesar ones. That one goes like this: God is the maker and designer of your child and your child doesn’t belong to you, he or she belongs to him (God). The child is only yours for a while. All you have to do, to the best of your pathetic ability, is deliver up the soul of the child back to God so that he (God, not the child) won’t be mad at you. You don’t really have any rights or privileges in this situation, other than the immense privilege of getting to be with the child for a while, though it is often hard to “feel” the truth of this as you struggle along. The great thing about this is that you can deliver up the soul of your child in many different kinds of imperfect situations. You don’t have to land on just one bad educational situation, you can work with all of them!

Another helpful clarification is the You’re Not That Powerful one. Someone gave me this one before the birth of my first child and I have found it to be such a comfort. The thing is, both you and your child are sinners. And sin makes you weak. You not only can’t do what you know you should do, most of the time you don’t even want to. And neither does your loathsome adorable offspring. Unless you absolutely set out to ruin the life of your child (which, as we are unfortunately privy to because of social media, apparently a lot of people are so malign and wicked that they set out to do just that), you really can’t utterly destroy everything. If you do the best you can and beg God constantly for help and ask for a lot of forgiveness of everyone, it will probably be ok. God is stronger than you and he makes it all ok—eventually. That’s literally why he died for you.

And, for good measure, I’ll add in, Don’t Play God. But that’s true for everyone, whether or not you’re involved in the educational industrial complex or just trying to teach a recalcitrant child to read. Have a nice day! I’ve got some kids I’ve got to go yell at about their “learning loss.” Boy, that is a great great term. Almost as good as “impactfulness.”

Demotivations with Anne

homeschooling

Just Plain Sarcastic

vanity

Previous Post

August 30, 2021

Cynical Religions Podcast and Links

Next Post

September 1, 2021 What A Great Day

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category books Catechesis of the Good Shepherd Children in Conversation culture watch Daily Devotions Demotivations with Anne faith alone for the grandparents GAFCON In conversation with children In the News Kitchen Notes Lambeth Learning Notes Life Going On Men are Human Notes from Home Pictures Reading the Bible Saturday Links Sermons Signs of the Apocalypse The Bad Word Association The Prayer of Jonah Travel Notes Uncategorized Witless Wednesdays Work and the Christian

Select a Month June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 July 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was the oldest man recorded in the Bible?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Noah Methuselah Jared Adam

Books by This Author Books by Anne Kennedy

See All Titles »