My three year old grandson will go to the schools listed in this article. The emails written by a principal and some parents in this affluent liberal neighborhoods, seems to have unintentionally created a discussion about how best to create empathy in young children.
The Emails published in this blog format are a form of “social learning construct”. Interesting how this backlash turned into a relevant conversation starter with the use of technology. The social context is enabling change in a positive direction or not??
Reaction to the Black Lives Matter day might have been more muted had Sarah Talbot, the principal at Laurelhurst, not sent an email afterward to parents.
“I heard from a few parents concerned about what teachers weren’t saying,” Talbot wrote.
“They weren’t saying anything about lives — the lives of students, parents and families — who are not black. I worried about that too. Would our Native students feel left out, since they face the same (or worse) effects of systemic racism in schools and outside of schools that black students face? What about the majority of the students in our school who are white? They also live with the effects of a society that unfairly prioritizes their lives.
“But then I remembered that at Laurelhurst Elementary, we have a 20 percent difference in the growth of black students’ reading skills when compared to the average growth of all students at our school.”
One of the conundrums of our ongoing communications revolution is what happens when we share our POV across formerly unconnected societal groups? In the short term it seems likely to create a lot of friction, because people think differently about their world, and the world outside their ‘group’.
Douglas Adams, noted author of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe”, joked that actually allowing people to hear what other people were saying by using a translating fish in one’s ear, caused all sorts of “worse” problems than what existed before.
We’re all in a big experiment, because now we do have ways to connect easily to what others are saying and thinking, and of course it is disturbing and stirs up fears and perhaps overt hatred. In such a world, how do we successfully enable social learning constructs?
Well, like many things, there’s an art and a science of doing it well, and we are all still learning best practices and best platforms and that the devil is in the details….where he usually resides.
“Progress” in human affairs has never been easy, but that’s not to say impossible. PSA believes there’s social learning constructs out there that can be improved step by “trial and error” step, and that we’ll just have to keep working on it, and believing there’s places to go that humans haven’t fully grasped yet. Not that utopia is going to suddenly “break out”…it’s going to still be a tough world with conflicts…between groups but also within groups, such as occurs in families and with workplace conflict.
But it can be a smarter and less dysfunctional and fear driven neurotic world.