Building the Village

“I'm not talking about a dating site, I'm talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.” The Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network uses this line to describe his burgeoning idea that would ultimately become Facebook. It’s an apt and fascinating metaphor for the ubiquitous site.

I remember the use of bulletin boards outside the dorm as an ad hoc post office or photo album or artistic canvas. In hindsight, no one ever gave or received more than a fleeting glimpse into a dorm-mate’s psyche by writing on a miniature white board or pinning a picture to cork. Yet we were all fishing for those glimpses, and we all took care to decorate our own door-side “profiles” like meticulously baited lines in the water, hoping that a new friend or a new love would bite. The parallels to my current Facebook antics and those of my hundreds of “friends” ring quite true.

Does the dorm experience make us a social network, though? What if, as college students, we adapted to our scant resources in this way because we entered the school with a collegial mentality already in place? Perhaps we chose not to be satisfied with the isolation of our bunk-bed cell because we instinctually prefer to know the adjoining residents. The school gave us very little to start with, but we walked into school with a village mentality – a craving for deep, meaningful connections that would enable us to share experiences and find mutual support. Any school – elementary, secondary, or collegiate – can do quite a bit to foster this attitude in their students, but I sense that young people no longer arrive on our campuses with this village programming already in place. A review of data presented by the Wall Street Journal and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that one-third of American children will witness up to six parental job changes and a divorce or separation during his/her K-12 academic career. In the face of such upheaval, I’m not sure we can assume any longer that children enter our public schools with a sense of community already in place. A staggering number of these students come to their classrooms (even their secondary classrooms) hoping to find their first village, their first stable social network.

Schools do have a responsibility to create that village for their neighborhood families – one that celebrates academic and personal growth in a way that popular media and culture rarely does. Filling that vacuum isn’t difficult. The documentary Bloods and Crips – Made in America illustrates how even a violence-torn patch of Los Angeles can quickly convert hatred to unity. Twice in the past six decades the Bloods and Crips actually entered into a peaceful, cooperative pact – once during the civil rights movement as they jointly supported the Black Panthers, and again when the organization Rebuild LA pledged to create jobs in South Central after the Rodney King uprising. Sadly, when both movements melted away without many visible signs of social progress, the dashed hopes of these neighborhoods quickly re-ignited their violent traditions. Public schools don’t need to be riddled with gangs to heed the lesson: even the most downtrodden community will quickly rally towards a vision that includes and empowers them towards a greater future. Education has to be that rallying point, and schools need to be clear enough in their vision that they can construct the village that sustains that empowerment on a daily basis. One might expect that a public school would serve as an extension of the neighborhood in which it resides; I’m not sure that’s necessarily the best model. Every child and teenager seeks a sense of community, but increasingly in modern America, public schools seem to be serving multiple neighborhoods at once. Much to Zuckerberg’s chagrin, I’m afraid the advent of social technology has actually crippled many schools’ efforts to forge those connections. Too many schools believe that electronic outreach is sufficient outreach.

We were asked to observe how the school(s) that serve our own children reach out to parents. I found this incredibly eye-opening, as I found my son’s elementary school guilty of assuming the community would come to the school. First, the school never really sent any notices home – they all came from either the teacher or the parent group, with the latter relying heavily on e-mail. Moreover, nearly every missive came with a smug invitation to donate time, money, and/or services to this week’s classroom activity and/or next week’s school fundraiser. I say “smug” because each of these solicitations implied that of course, as a caring parent, I must be planning to attend. A strong whiff of entitlement floated off the prose, and the high school where I work seems no different. My own colleagues – including the parents I work closely with on our Debate Boosters – become aghast when they get little to no response from their missives. Didn’t you see the PTSA bulletin? Didn’t you receive the e-mail on Schoolloop? Actually, one in five families at the school where I work is low-income, so no, they’re probably not getting the e-mails. Oh, and that bulletin is only printed in two languages; our neighborhoods speak about ten other tongues. The modern public school suffers from the assumption that by posting events on its marquees (especially the ones in cyberspace), all the news and events on campus will naturally cycle through the grocery aisles and coffee shops. You cannot serve several communities at once with one website, a set of emails, or even a monthly bulletin mailed home.

The construction of a proud village within and around a school begins not with publicity, but with public engagement. It is a social network forged through conversation, eye contact, and maybe some shared food and beverages. A reliance on one-sided technology cannot nurture a sense of pride in one’s local schools, and it fails to make families feel valued and welcome. Without this communal connection, a school has no more value than its annual – just another book of faces.