All Children Are All Our Children by Doug Selwyn

Today’s post comes from Doug Selwyn. Doug has been an educator for more than thirty years, the first half as a teacher in K–12 in the Seattle Public Schools and the second half in teacher education, first at Antioch University, Seattle and then for ten years as a professor of education at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh until his retirement in 2017. He received his doctorate from Seattle University in 1991 and was named Washington State social studies teacher of the year in 1990–91. He has published several books on education, including Following the Threads (Peter Lang, 2009) and most recently All Children Are All Our Children (Peter Lang, 2019). He lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts, with his wife, writer Jan Maher.

As we start, I’d like to ask you to consider the following questions. If you are not close to a child now, think about one you were close to in the past:

• Think about a child you are close to; What do you want for them, hope for them? What are your wishes and dreams for them?
• What supports them to move towards what you most hope for them? What helps them to stay on that path?
• How does what you hope for the child you have in mind child compare with your hopes and dreams for other people’s children?

Notice that we are, most if not all of us thinking about a different child than are other people reading this. How can we truly serve all children connected to our small group of blog readers, and to go beyond that, to all children? What will it take for us to consider all children “our” children, and treat them as such?

I came to these questions early in my teaching career when it became clear that many of our students were not well served by the systems within the school district or within the larger society. Why are one in five students going to bed hungry, why are millions living with insecure housing, inadequate clothing, and little or no access to health care in the richest country in the history of the world. And why does it continue to get worse?

I began an inquiry built around the question, “what would it look like if our primary focus was the health and well being of all of our children?” What would we keep, what would we need to change? I want to briefly share what I found.

First, the fact that there is significant poverty and inequality across this country is a consequence of political decisions by those in power. During the nineteen sixties and early 1970s the US was much less a gap between the wealthy and the rest of us (knowing that there was certainly greater inequality for families of color). The tax rate on the wealthy was over 90%, unions were strong and providing living wage jobs, many with benefits, and the economy was strong. At that time the US was among the healthiest countries in the world. Since that time the tax rate on the wealthy has come down to 37%, unions have been weakened and more of us are working at poorly paying jobs with no benefits. We are now a much less healthy population; more of our families are struggling, and more of our children are coming to school unhealthy, and not ready to learn. When people push on schools to improve we have to recognize there is only so much we can do without addressing the underlying societal inequalities that lead to more children needing more services and support when they arrive at school, while schools are receiving fewer resources to bring to them.

It’s Political

Schools are caught between the ideals of democracy, with its focus on the common good, and the emphasis on developing an informed citizenry able to think critically and engage in the governing process on the one hand, and corporate capitalism, our current dominant economic system that values short term profits over everything else, discourage citizen involvement or the sharing of information, and values competition over cooperation. It’s all about making money for owners and investors with little concern for what that does to the commons.

Schools were more student-centered, more democratic in the late sixties and early seventies. In recent decades they have shifted to carrying out the values of the corporate agenda, so they now emphasize winners and losers, a one size fits all approach that is more factory model than anything else, and evaluate through high stakes testing, a manifestation of the eugenics movement, as a way of sorting students into a few winners and many, many losers. We know who the “losers” are: students of color, second language learners, those who are test phobic, those whose strengths don’t match the test heavy approach that dominates the school curriculum, those who have learning challenges. And the system does not care; it, in fact, blames those students who fail, blames their families, and blames those who teach them. In reality, the system is failing them.

So, what to do? The larger answer is to work against this focus on having schools carrying out a corporate, winner take all agenda and move it back to student-centered education where every child is valued. We know that is a heavy lift and won’t happen tomorrow, so while we are working on that there are many things we can do in our schools and communities to make a difference for our current students. Here are a few thoughts:

Building relationships. The most important steps we can take are building relationships with all of our students and their families, making sure they know we value and welcome them all to school and will do all we can to serve them as well as we can. This requires a multifaceted approach, from the ways in which we greet students in the morning to the ways we get to know students as learners and as “whole children,” the ways we organize our classrooms so that all students are supporting each and every one of their classmates, to making clear that our students are more important than any test or policy.

Physical Health. We must attend to the physical health of our students, recognizing that many come to school hungry, tired, emotionally stressed, or physically ill. We can feed them nutritious foods, including healthy snacks in the rooms. We can have clinics and/or medical staff to provide screenings and first level care in buildings. We can make sure our buildings are healthy. We can guarantee opportunities for students to move, to have recess, to leave their chairs on a regular basis. We can work with families to support them so that they can support their children.

Learning to learn. We can help our children learn how to learn, and to recognize the full range of what is called intelligence so that they know that schools only value a narrow range of their gifts. A student who can take apart an engine and put it back together, or who can dance, or paint, may be labeled a failure at school because she does not read well, but that is not an accurate reading of who she is. Students who are taking a test in a second or third language are not less intelligent than their classmates who only speak one language but score higher. Helping students to learn about themselves as learners, and to learn to appreciate their strengths while developing other areas can approach their education with confidence and appreciation for who they are.

Provide opportunity. We can offer students an opportunity to use their learning and developing skills in service to what matters to them. We know that students bring their worlds with them into our classrooms, and we can allow space for those worlds as part of our curriculum. When we are teaching research skills, why not allow them to research what matters to them, what they care about? When they are writing persuasive essays, why not have them write about issues that are their concerns. Why not allow them to read about what they care about most? The skills required are the same and they will be most engaged when their learning is meaningful to them. We can respect them enough to include them in making decisions about their education. And, we can tell them the truth. That means going beyond textbooks and patriotic centered curriculum passed down by the state, bringing multiple informed points of view and perspectives to what is being studied in hopes of understanding what has happened in our country and why.

This is a woefully abbreviated list of small steps that will add to larger consequences. There are many steps we can take outside of school, such as bringing together agencies, religious organizations, social agencies, and concerned individuals to focus on issues of common concern, and bringing community resources into the schools as part of the children’s education, even as we bring students out into the community, to both serve the town and to learn from experiences out of the classroom.

Schools are part of the larger communities in which they reside and the more we can cooperate and collaborate to bring together our assets and ideas, the more we will be able to support our families and children to live healthier and valued lives.

Doug Selwyn, dougselwyn@aol.com, September 12, 2019