Who You Learn With

 

Whether grad school or kindergarten, and with all due respect to teachers, the educational experience is so much more than what you receive from the adult in the front of the room. Obviously it’s the whole package from recess to clubs and neighborhood to commute. Even in the classroom, who you learn with is just as if not more of a determinant than what you learn. I don’t think anyone would dispute this.

Yet things become dicey when we layer on matters of race and class. There’s a whole history and industry around upper-class families organizing themselves to keep lower-class families out of their communities for the purpose of making sure their kids don’t share a classroom with “those” kids. There is almost always a racial element to these efforts, which is almost never said out loud when you can hang your hat on things like minimum lot sizes and restrictive zoning.

Those who allege to be pro-education and politically liberal are often the most vehement when seeking a segregated educational experience for their kids. The irony, of course, is that the homogenous experience they end up with runs counter to the very things they purport to value, namely a high-quality education to prepare their children for a complex and diverse world. For what better way to learn than to learn with others whose life experiences are different from yours? 

We have been exceedingly fortunate to send our kids to public schools that are pretty diverse, especially when compared to the vast majority of racially and socio-economically homogenous schools in our city and in the communities most of my friends and family live in. Honestly, if you gave me a billion dollars and told me I could pick any school in the world to send my kids, I’d probably still pick our neighborhood K-8 and the selective magnet school our two tends attend. 

Because who they learn with has been a remarkable racial and ethnic mix of rich and poor, homegrown and immigrant, and in the case of our older kids’ high school, representing every neighborhood in this fair city. That’s hard to beat.