Social mix at school is good for society

Summer is dead. Long live the school year.

No interregnum for area school children, their teachers or their parents. Or if there is a pause between the end of summer and the beginning of school, it is filled with dusting off lunchboxes, buying packs of notebook paper and setting alarm clocks earlier.

The beginning of the school year is also a time for serious reflection – not just for parents giving their children pep talks about working hard or teachers finding creative ways to help their students learn. Each of us, whether we have children in public schools or not, is a stakeholder in public education, and the beginning of each school year is a reminder that we have a responsibility to all children.

The vast majority – 9 out of 10 – attend public schools. Those children will grow up to be our neurosurgeons, our cab drivers, our corporate CEOs, our waiters – the people who will serve the community and determine the future. The educational experiences that shape them are in our hands now.

We don’t have to be parents of public school children to advocate for them. Pay attention to education policies being crafted at the state and national levels. Ask who is really pushing them – local people who know their communities or the billionaire investors and legislative members of the American Legislative Exchange Council who write model bills that promote privatizing education?

Ask who benefits from lifting charter caps and increasing vouchers – children or the adults who run for-profit schools?

Speak out about poverty and challenge those who deny its effect on education. Support needy children with donations of school supplies and clothes. Tutor a struggling child. Be a classroom volunteer.

In his book “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” Michael Sandel, professor of government at Harvard, makes the case that privatization often leads to inequality and corruption.

“Commercialism erodes commonality,” he writes. “The more things money can buy, the fewer the occasions when people from different walks of life encounter one another. We see this when we go to a baseball game and gaze up at the skyboxes, or down from them, as the case may be. The disappearance of the class-mixing experience once found at the ballpark represents a loss not only for those looking up but also for those looking down.

“Something similar has been happening throughout our society. At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. You might call it the skyboxification of American life. It’s not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live.

“Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of everyday life. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”

I suspect that too many of us are quite happy living balkanized lives, unconcerned about Other People’s Children. We’ve narrowed our circle of concern to ourselves – including our families and friends, perhaps, but excluding those we don’t consider worthy.

It’s a shameful, shortsighted disregard. If nothing else, the beginning of a new school year should make us reconsider it.

This story was originally published August 18, 2015 at 6:50 PM with the headline "Social mix at school is good for society."