The great Community Spotlighted diary Liberal Lemmings - a thought-provoking account about a parent's frustration with the dogmatic belief in the superiority of private education among even the progressive wealthy - got me thinking about another aspect of our society's problems that gets far less attention than selfishness: A corollary, but much harder-to-spot problem - our habit of thinking about what our environment can do for us rather than what we can do for it. President Kennedy's admonition half a century ago is still powerful for revealing a hidden truth: That we gain far more by contributing constructively to a greater purpose than we gain by demanding or buying from others.
The "grocery shopper" attitude is a one-dimensional, one-directional way of seeing decisions in society and is a huge part of what empowers selfishness in the first place. In this mentality's universe, the absolute best possible outcome is that you exchange one thing for another thing of equal value, because even with the mere possibility of advantage, people know from experience that on balance a normal person with a conscience and no great political power is not going to be the one coming out on top in a typical transaction. They know that with most things they buy in a laissez-faire economy, they're being slowly bled - their economic value draining away while it gradually accumulates in the offshore bank accounts of some ultra-wealthy international class they will never interact with (even when they lose their jobs due to its decisions), and that considers their lives, hopes, and dreams totally irrelevant.
This trains the people to hold an attitude not only of pessimism, but of zero-sum Malthusian struggle: The idea that any transaction is purely a matter of one entity giving and another taking, ignoring if not definitively ruling out the cooperative synergies that make real civilization possible. It's the worst of all possible worlds, where those who come into privilege rationalize every possible depravity to maintain it because they believe "It's either me or you," and those they victimize, while idly wishing that their oppressors were better people, can't imagine being better themselves because they believe they can't afford to contribute to their community. Average people are taught to think something given to the community is something they no longer have, rather than something they now have in an even greater and more robust form, so while bitterly condemning the wealthy for not being more generous, they behave exactly the same and consider it justified because their immediate needs are so much more acute.
A big part of that is indeed the pathological narcissism and lack of empathy that drives conservative politics, and which we spend plenty of time highlighting those problems, but what about the phenomenon described in the diary cited above - wealthy progressives who nonetheless are convinced that private education is superior to public education? Quite simply, they're not wrong...within the framework of the one-dimensional, zero-sum thinking we've all been brainwashed into accepting for decades. As long as you treat every decision as being like shopping for retail goods, then by definition you're going to spiral down to the conclusion that the best way to do things is to literally be shopping in a market. It's circular logic, and it boils down to "Which gives me the best market value of something? A market, or something that's not a market?" Only by acknowledging that markets don't necessarily apply does the wider perspective, and larger criteria come into play.
Aside from the obvious need to ensure that their kid isn't going to end up being shot, bullied every day, hooked on crack, or treated like a faceless farm animal by the staff, why don't parents ask themselves what kind of school would most benefit from my child's presence? Why don't they ask what their child can contribute to the school and the community, and what kind of school would be best for inspiring that spirit in them? What kind of school gives the right balance of nurturing and challenge? Sending a child to a school where everyone and everyone's parents know each other, have an exclusive economic network, and merely cultivate students into the shape of that network's values is not education, it's cloning. Schools are supposed to be places where minds and citizens grow, not where people of a given class are trained to be consumers and aristocrats.
It sounds counterintuitive, but the wealthy are not well-served by the prep school system - it may make them feel all warm and fuzzy knowing all the same people all the time, knowing that as long as they do as they're told everything will be covered for them, but it makes them weak people, prone to being weak citizens or worse, and we see that fact constantly on display. Useless sponges like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush are far more common in that crowd than the Kennedy brothers ever were or ever will be, and it's because their parents learned to make educational decisions the way they make economic decisions: I'll write a check, and you fill my kid's head with what I want to be there so they'll act like me and end up living like me. It's the old problem of everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer - when everything around you is money, then money is the answer to everything, and things that cost more are worth more.
Those people are not capable of leading or even maintaining a country: Even when they like to think of themselves as progressive, their entire world is inherently conservative, because everything is already structured for them and the real cost of it is always hidden from them. Ultimately left/right in the prep school mind just boils down to whether they want to be a charitable, paternalistic King who treats the common people like children or a brutal, elitist King who treats the common people like slaves, and that's not citizenship. That's degenerate. There is nothing a student can do to make a rich prep school any better - they would have to transcend the very framework in which they're being taught to do that, which is an impossibly tall order when an entire world of riches has been poured into surrounding them with a seamless, air-tight social environment. And that's what they teach their students about America - that it is not to be improved, merely made more closely in the image of the prep school: Inherit, do not create. If you have a problem with the system, cheat it, don't challenge it.
If you are a wealthy student in an elite private school, then it is your fate to either go into business or some other elite profession and continue the culture as you've inherited it, or else just be a lazy sponge and spend your life clubbing and snorting coke - but truly changing things is not an option, and even if you wanted it to be, you were never given the opportunity to learn how. Your parents could have cut you off at any time with a wave of the hand if you displease them; your school, as a private entity, could have thrown you out at any time if you became a problem; your social set would have thrown you to the wolves if you became the least bit inconvenient; so you become an expert at fitting in and not rocking the boat. You learn how insignificant you truly are (and by extension, everyone else too), even as you're fed the opiate of having your material comforts waited on hand-and-foot by everyone around you. Your idiotic impulses have the force of law, but your highest nature - your courage and creativity - is degraded and devalued.
But you can't have this extreme without the other: The prison-school where the disadvantaged go who don't have the money to pour into creating the illusion of education at the expense of the reality. And yet here's something you won't hear very often: These grim, bleak places teach exactly the same thing as the prep schools - that things cannot be changed in any fundamental way, and if you aren't satisfied with the way things are, all you can do is steal and materially improve your own lot rather than challenging the status quo in order to make things better for everyone.
Control is enforced with brutal determination in these places, both by the students and the administration: To avoid chaos, a police state is instituted where minor infractions that are the normal behavior of youth can sometimes be met with egregiously punitive measures - children expelled for drawing violent scenes they saw in a movie, forced to endure arduous administrative proceedings at the district level for kicking over a trash can, tasered by police for mouthing off, etc. etc. Meanwhile failing to adhere to the dress code of prevailing styles can subject a student to constant violence from peers - dress like a punk with green hair and piercings in a place where everyone dresses hip-hop, and you'll get your ass kicked constantly - and an administration that, being authoritarian, "deals" with the problem by punishing the person who behaves differently rather than the mob mentality that attacks them. It's no coincidence that both rich schools and poor schools are the most common places for students to be forced to wear uniforms.
Both rich and poor schools plainly communicate a simple message: You don't matter. If you are rich, then only your money matters, and it will continue to thrive regardless of what you do with it - be a businessman, be a doctor, be a lawyer, we don't care, just don't do anything that would erode the political power of that money or you'll be cast out. If you are poor, then all that matters is your obedience - obey society and become the next generation of janitors, garbage men, housekeepers, cops, and prison guards to serve the elite and keep others like yourself in line; obey some local, unofficial authority like a gang and be a useful idiot making life miserable for others like yourself while justifying the ignorance and oppression meted out to your community; obey your basest impulses and retreat into drug addiction, becoming a useful cog in the multi-billion-dollar drug war machine. But whatever you do, don't change things. Don't make life complicated for all the degenerate authoritarians in all the multitude of capacities who have gotten comfortable in their roles as Judas goats for the masses.
Just follow the path laid out for you by the cattle gates like the animals you are: Wherever you are, whoever you are, obey. If you are told that you are inherently elite and deserve to live comfortably at other people's expense while evading taxes, obey. If you are told that learning is for chumps, obey. If you are told that you are a criminal or destined to become garbage, obey. Do not ever assert your humanity and the inherent dignity of all people - do not shine your worth in front of cowards and thieving rats who will be enraged and terrified by it. Do not show you are unafraid in front of people whose very walls of reality are defined by fear. Because if you do, then you are The Enemy, and you will be surrounded by frightened, hungry rats of all stripes.
But there is a middle ground, as in all things, and it is the place where the best truly shines: And as in most cases, it is not a trivial thing to find. It's no more true to say that the best schools are middle-class than to say the best schools are rich - there are plenty of middle-income schools that simply run either like inferior prep schools or well-groomed prisons, because both mentalities infect the middle-class. You will always find school administrations run by perverted bullies obsessed with Authoritah, soulless corporate sickos who see students as products, or sycophants to the wealthiest members of a community who treat schools as bargain daycare so the kids aren't running around lowering property values. And yes, you may even find good schools that are rich or poor.
Nevertheless, it is only the middle-class where the balance of nurture and challenge, freedom and order, authority and creativity is natural - only there where an optimum educational environment has a good chance of being reflected at home. If a student goes to a great school where these things are in balance, but goes home to chaos or tyranny, the benefit will be greatly reduced. And it's because everything feeds back - nothing exists in a vacuum, including the students themselves. They contribute something to what a school is like, and the more they are shaped by it, the more they shape it in turn. It's a sad thing, and a disservice both to America and to students themselves, that parents almost never ask what kind of school would best be served by having their children - it's always just like some kind of stupid financial transaction, "What place can I send my kids that they'll take away the most?" Usually that just robs people of a lot of opportunities.
This country was built by people who preferred to accept relatively rustic conditions for the chance of making new things rather than struggle or inherit their way through the stifling social environments of the Old World, and that made everything since possible. Sooner or later you have to let go of the past, let go of the excellent and immaculate art of your ancestors and just make a fresh start from a reasonably helpful foundation. Obviously you can't make something out of nothing - that is a rich man's fantasy based on their simple ignorance of all the ways the world props them up - but you can build a better paradise starting from a promising little field in a sleepy part of town than polishing the brass on any 500-year-old institution.
Only in rejecting authoritarianism is any future remotely different from the past possible, and that rejection is only possible when we recognize in ourselves that it's equally important to find a place where we are of benefit to others rather than just jockeying to occupy the sweetest and easiest piece of ground. Elitism has its place, but as a general strategy it's the dumbest possible attitude to have: It just forces people into rigid categories and churns out clones of robotic aristocrats with no ideas and defeated working people with no hope or courage. That doesn't mean anyone in particular can or should be volunteering in third-world clinics or send their kids to low-quality schools - again, the key is balance.
There has to be enough support that what you contribute grows and cascades, and isn't just sucked up in darkness, but also enough room to grow that life isn't just forced into some kind of template. If you send a strong kid to a typical poor or rich school, it'll just be too easy in different ways - they'll walk all over the other kids academically in an underachieving school and not be challenged to work, or their level of personal initiative will so outshine the weak-willed Lords and Ladies of the prep school set whose parents' money shields them from everything that they'll be infected by the same kind of lazy, entitled complacency. Stop looking for schools, or cities, or states, or countries that will give you the most, and just look for places where your talent will shine the brightest and be of the greatest benefit to the world.