I have often thought of myself as an optimistic skeptic (or perhaps a skeptical optimist). As an optimist, I have always seen opportunities amidst challenges and I fundamentally believe that the world is continually in the process of becoming better. The Robert F. Kennedy quote I chose for my high school yearbook, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,” is more than 35 years later still hanging on a wall in my home.
At the same time, I am by passion and training a historian, fascinated by better understanding the past and full of a healthy skepticism that comes from seeing how the interpretation of historical events evolves over time. My go-to book to share with students when I was first teaching in the 1990s, for example, was James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything My American History Teacher Got Wrong, a work that challenged us to broaden our understanding of American history. In a similar vein, one of my more thought-provoking projects in college was a comparative analysis of textbooks from the South and from the North written between 1880 – 1920 and how they described the Civil War and Reconstruction. It often felt like you were reading about totally different events, a reminder that we should consult – and critically analyze – multiple sources when trying to understand an issue, and also that we must always be aware that historical interpretations have often been used to serve contemporary political and social needs. History is rarely neutral.
I have been thinking a lot about this recently as we have been talking about how to help students engage with the upcoming election. As a school, we believe that it is critical for us to find age-appropriate ways for students to learn about the world around them. We also know there are a few things that make this challenging.
First, we live in a particularly contentious and polarizing moment, with 24-hour news cycles and social media channels that create an insatiable need and space for content, the more provocative the better.
Second, the issues that we are facing, from climate change to war in the Middle East, are longstanding and complicated and may feel overwhelming, potentially leaving students (and adults!) with a sense of helplessness.
And, finally, people from all sides sometimes speak about this moment and the issues in apocalyptic terms, adding, particularly for students, a heightened fear about the stakes and a smaller sense of hope and agency.
With this as a backdrop, we, as a team at Hillbrook, have tried to ground our work in protopian thinking, the idea that there is a future worth working towards, a future that will not be perfect, but will hopefully be better. We recognize that three things can be true at the same time – the world is awful, the world is much better, and the world can be much better. As an example, as of 2023,16 percent of children in the United States (or more than 11 million children) live in poverty, which is a terrible reality. At the same time, this is a decrease from nearly 20 percent of children in 2013, a sign of progress. And, of course, any level of childhood poverty is something that needs to be addressed and there remains lots of room for it to be better.
There is a future worth working towards, a future that will not be perfect, but will hopefully be better.
A key piece of protopian thinking is that it invites all of us to find pathways toward a better future. For students, it gives them some level of agency, the belief that they are able to influence the world around them. The Scott Center core questions – what matters to you? & what are you doing about it? – reflect this belief that students of all ages are capable of engaging in real-world conversations and then taking action that is meaningful to them.
In the context of the election, that means we are creating developmental targeted content that is grounded in our communication norms and core values. Particularly with older students, we are focused on building the skills for deliberation and civic discourse, skills that feel ever more important in our current moment. A number of Upper School students, for example, have been participating in an Exploratory that is focused on the election. Upper School History teacher and Dean of Student Life Lauryl Grimes has been guiding conversations that encourage students to ask questions about how the election is being covered, to dive into the electoral process itself, and to broaden their conversations beyond the presidential election to other items on the ballot As another example, and as I have shared in my Jam a few weeks ago, I took time this Fall to teach an Immersive course to 10th graders focused on the First amendment and free expression. This course created an opportunity for students to deep dive into campus protest on college campuses, a timely and critical topic – and one that created the space for important conversations about free speech and civic discourse.
We were excited to have families join us for two Family Education sessions a few weeks ago where we focused on this topic – “Teaching the Election & Global Events”, one at the Los Gatos campus and one at the San José campus. During both sessions, we offered insights into how we are framing the conversation and then had parents participate with us in scenarios to talk through how we, as parents, might respond in unexpected moments. Scenarios included a moment where our child, while with a group of their friends and in our earshot, makes a sweeping statement about who people are voting for, another moment where our child expressed discomfort with a relative who shared politically charged statements, and a final moment where our high school-age child posts a political meme and then is hurt by the negative reaction they receive from some classmates, including the loss of some followers. The conversation was lively and, perhaps not surprisingly, highlighted how thinking through the parental response to these moments offers insight into how to best be a parent, not just for the election. Parenting is hard, and these conversations provided a welcome opportunity to think with other parents and with members of our team about how we can all support the children in our care.
Returning to where I started, as an optimistic skeptic, I think I’m likely predisposed to protopian thinking. Indeed, when I first heard the term, it just made sense to me. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously intoned in 1968, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” As we work with children, it is important, I believe, that we retain that sense of skeptical optimism, a belief that, through fits and starts, we are tinkering toward a better world.