there’s no decolonization without dismantling the gender binary.
the intersectional person is the one who binds community—because they actually understand and empathize with everyone.
countries and communities who stigmatize nonbinary identity and orientation are doing white colonizers’ work: one-drop purity tests don’t build you up—they prove you’re not good enough.
if you’re judging someone for their nonconformity, just know that you’re doing the white colonizers’ work. no reason not to say it out loud.
How Life Outside of School Shapes Childhood Education
Part 2 in a series. In my study of what works in the effort to serve children’s needs and help them to become happy and healthy adults, I take copious notes. I find it helpful, occasionally, to compile and summarize these notes into a narrative. Why? Because my brain saves all of these notes, and my conversations are built from them, but sometimes the conversations don’t last long enough to articulate the internal narrative I’m working from. This series is an attempt to share my internal narrative, and open it to peer review. I take my notes from memory, and almost never cite sources. That being said, I invite the reader to connect any of the points made here to existing research and share their conclusions. This is a conversation, not a dissertation.
The history of American education is usually told through its institutions—the schoolhouse, the curriculum, the policy. But for most of the past two and a half centuries, the school day occupied only a fraction of a child’s waking hours. What happened in the remaining hours was not a blank space, and not the same for every child. It also counts as education—in labor, in play, in hunger or comfort, in the rhythms of a household shaped by class, race, and economic circumstance. The school day has always had a shadow: longer, less legible, and distributed with the same radical inequality as everything else. What follows is an attempt to describe that shadow in the same fifty-year intervals as the institutional history it runs alongside.
This is not original scholarship: it’s simply an overview in a legible timeline to point out patterns that have been documented in depth elsewhere. It’s a way of opening my working premises to a wider conversation. Let it be a springboard to deeper inquiry, rather than a document of record.
1750–1800: Childhood as Labor
For the vast majority of children in colonial America, the question of what happened outside school was easily answered: work. The agricultural economy ran on the labor of everyone in a household old enough to be useful. Children were useful early. By six or seven, they were tending animals, hauling water, carding wool, minding younger siblings, and helping with whatever the season demanded. The school day, where it existed at all, was short—often only a few hours in the morning—and seasonal, structured around planting and harvest rather than a fixed calendar. A child might attend for a few months in winter when farm labor slackened and be pulled back to the fields before spring.
The school day for a boy of the gentry class looked entirely different. It was longer, held in a dedicated space, and governed by a curriculum that assumed leisure time for further study. Tutors supplemented formal schooling. Books were available at home. The afternoon hours that a farming child spent at labor, a wealthy child might spend in supervised reading, music practice, or what passed for recreational activity—riding, games of skill, the cultivated pastimes of a class that had purchased the right to prepare its sons for a station rather than deploy them as laborers.
For enslaved children, education in anything other than farm labor was forbidden. Their hours belonged entirely to the labor economy of the plantation. Play existed—ethnographic and autobiographical accounts document the games children made in stolen moments—but it was unauthorized, shadowed by the constant proximity of surveillance and violence. Indigenous children in mission settlements were similarly subject to regimented labor under the guise of civilizational education.
The journey to school, where school existed, was almost always on foot. Distance was a real barrier: rural families might live miles from the nearest schoolhouse, and in winter those miles were genuine obstacles. The children most likely to attend were those who lived nearest—which in most communities meant children of the more established families, since the poor tended to live at the margins.
The baseline: Childhood is labor for the majority. The school day is short and seasonal, fitted around agricultural need. Time outside school means more work, not less — except for the children of families wealthy enough to have purchased their children’s time.
Who benefited: Children of the gentry and merchant classes, whose non-school hours were structured around cultivation and leisure. Their childhoods had room in them.
Who was excluded: Farm children, working poor children, enslaved children, and Indigenous children under mission control, for whom the hours outside school were simply more hours of work, or were not theirs to direct at all.
1800–1850: The Mill Child and the Country Child
The early industrial period splits the picture further. In the expanding cities and mill towns of the Northeast, children as young as seven or eight entered factory work—the textile mills of Lowell and Lawrence, the print shops, the glass factories. The school day competed directly with the work day. Many families could not afford to send children to school at all; a child’s wages were a structural part of household budgets. Where children did attend school, they arrived already tired, often having worked early morning shifts before the schoolhouse opened, and left to work again in the afternoon.
The common school movement of this era, championed by Horace Mann and others, was partly a response to this reality—an argument that children needed time set aside for learning. But the reformers were also motivated by anxieties about what unsupervised working-class children did with unstructured time: they played in streets, joined gangs, and generally failed to develop the habits of industry and deference that a properly ordered republic required. The common school was partly a moral intervention into children’s time—a way of filling hours that might otherwise be filled unproductively.
For rural children across the country, childhood outside school still meant the farm. The school day remained short—typically four to six hours—and the school year, even where compulsory attendance laws were beginning to appear, was rarely more than a few months. Play was largely unstructured and took place outdoors: sledding, swimming, fishing, musical ring plays, games of chase and capture that children organized themselves without adult direction. This was not ‘organized unstructured time’ as we think of it today; it was simply that adults were busy and children were left to occupy themselves within the bounds of the property.
For children of wealthy families, the period outside school was increasingly formalized. Music lessons, dancing lessons, and supervised social occasions were the architecture of upper-class childhood. Summer was spent at a second property or a resort. The journey to school might involve a private carriage. Physical distance from school was not an obstacle; it was a marker of social status.
The baseline: The school day is lengthening slightly in urban areas but remains short and seasonally compressed. For working-class and mill children, hours outside school are working hours. For rural children, unstructured outdoor play is the norm. For the wealthy, non-school time is a curriculum of its own.
Who benefited: Children of comfortable rural and merchant families, who had access to unstructured play time, modest material comfort, and a household economy that didn’t depend on their labor.
Who was excluded: Mill and factory children, whose time outside the schoolhouse was largely absorbed by wage labor. Enslaved children. Indigenous children. The urban poor, whose street play was viewed with suspicion and increasingly subject to institutional intervention.
1850–1900: Streets, Fields, and the Factory Floor
By the second half of the nineteenth century, child labor is at its historical peak. The 1900 census—counting at the end of this period—found nearly two million children between ten and fifteen engaged in paid labor, a figure that undercounts younger workers and those in agriculture. In cities, children sold newspapers, shined shoes, worked in canneries and textile mills and coal mines. The school day, now more standardized at roughly six hours in urban public schools, sat in the middle of a much longer day that began before dawn and ended after dark for many working children.
Recess as a formal institution begins to appear in this period, but unevenly. Urban public schools in wealthier districts might have a paved yard and a structured break. Schools in poor neighborhoods had whatever outdoor space happened to be available, if any.
The physical journey to school was almost always on foot, often considerable distances. In rural areas, children might walk two to four miles each way. In cities, the walk passed through neighborhoods where the density of poverty was itself a lesson—in precarity, in the reality of disease, in the density of adult labor.
For the children of the wealthy, this period introduces something new: organized sport and supervised leisure as a class institution. The private school sporting culture—crew, baseball, track—begins to take shape at the prep school level, and trickles into the recreation of upper-class children generally. Summer camps begin to appear in the 1880s, initially as health retreats for urban children of means. The concept of a childhood structured around physical development and wholesome outdoor recreation is being invented—but invented specifically for and by the affluent.
The baseline: Child labor is at its peak. For millions of children, the school day is bracketed on both sides by paid work. Recess exists in wealthier schools; outdoor play is an improvised affair for the poor. The wealthy are inventing organized recreational childhood.
Who benefited: Children of the professional and owning classes, whose non-school hours are increasingly structured around health, sport, and social formation. Their childhood is being designed.
Who was excluded: Working children in mines, mills, canneries, and streets, for whom the hours outside school were the hours that fulfilled the family budget. Rural children who walked hours daily to attend school for a fraction of the year.
1900–1950: The Playground Movement and the Leisure Gap
The progressive era produces the first serious institutional attention to children’s time outside the classroom. The playground movement—led by reformers like Jane Addams and Joseph Lee—argues that unstructured street play is dangerous and that structured outdoor recreation is a democratic necessity. Cities begin building public playgrounds in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, partly out of genuine concern for child welfare and partly as a form of social control: get children off the streets and into supervised spaces where their energies can be directed appropriately.
Compulsory attendance laws, now on the books in most states, extend the school day and the school year. By the 1920s, a six-to-seven hour school day with a fixed academic calendar is becoming the norm in urban schools. The school day is getting longer; the hours outside it are shrinking, at least in theory. In practice, poor and working-class children remained heavily engaged in household labor—caring for younger siblings, helping with domestic work, working in family businesses—while attending school in the time that remained.
The radio arrives in the 1920s and the after-school hours begin to take a new shape for middle-class families: a domestic, supervised, commercial leisure. Children’s programming fills the late afternoon. Consumption begins to organize childhood time in ways it never had before. This is largely a middle-class phenomenon; the poor listen where they can, but the new consumer childhood—snacks, toys, entertainment—belongs primarily to those with money to spend on it.
For Black children in the segregated South, the school year was often dramatically shorter than for white children—sometimes only three or four months—and the hours outside it were dominated by agricultural labor on a seasonal schedule that white landowners controlled. The gap between the childhood available to a white child in a northern suburb and a Black child in the rural South created a gap in what childhood itself meant to integration into society.
The baseline: The school day standardizes at six to seven hours. Playgrounds appear as institutional interventions into children’s time. Consumer leisure begins organizing middle-class childhood. For poor and Black children, time outside school remains dominated by labor, with wide regional disparities.
Who benefited: Middle-class white children in northern cities, who gain access to supervised playgrounds, consumer entertainment, and a lengthening period of structured childhood. Their afternoons are beginning to look like what we think of as childhood.
Who was excluded: Black children in the rural South, subject to truncated school years and heavy agricultural labor; immigrant and working-class children whose household economies still depended on their labor; children in overcrowded urban tenements with no access to outdoor play space.
1950–2000: The Suburban Afternoon and the Forgotten Child
The postwar period produces what many Americans still imagine when they picture a normal childhood: the suburban afternoon. School ends at three o’clock. Children walk or are driven home. The neighborhood is safe enough for unsupervised play; someone’s mother is usually around. Dinner at six. Television in the evening. This is the dominant image of mid-century American childhood—and it is the childhood of white suburban families, made possible by the GI Bill, federally subsidized highways, and housing policies that systematically excluded Black families from the neighborhoods where that afternoon was happening.
In cities, the picture is different. Urban public schools often lack the outdoor space of suburban ones. After-school hours in dense neighborhoods are spent on stoops, in streets, in apartments where multiple families share small units. For children of working mothers—a category growing rapidly through this period—the after-school hours can mean latchkey solitude, or the informal supervision of older siblings, or the streets.
The length of the school day remains roughly stable—six to seven hours—but what surrounds it begins to diverge sharply by class. Affluent families begin investing in after-school enrichment: music lessons, sports leagues, tutoring, summer programs. The infrastructure of organized childhood expands enormously in the 1970s and 1980s for families with money. Youth soccer leagues, swim teams, private music instruction, SAT prep courses—the non-school hours of wealthy children become as intentionally structured as the school hours, sometimes more so.
For poor children, the after-school hours are increasingly unsupervised and under-resourced. Public recreation programs are cut during the fiscal crises of the 1970s. Community centers close. The street remains, but the organized infrastructure of working-class neighborhood life—the settlement house, the church league, the union-sponsored recreation program—is fraying. The gap between what a wealthy child does from 3–6pm and what a poor child does in those same hours begins to compound into measurable outcome differences by high school.
Children arrive at school by bus, by car, and on foot—but increasingly, in wealthy districts, by car in the exclusive sense. The school run as a daily parental ritual is a product of this period. In poorer districts, the school bus (or public transit, or walking) remains the norm. The physical experience of getting to school—comfortable, supervised, door-to-door versus exposed, crowded, long—is itself a daily index of the broader divergence.
The baseline: The suburban afternoon becomes the idealized image of American childhood—and the reality for white middle-class families. Enrichment infrastructure expands dramatically for the affluent. Public recreation resources contract for the poor. The after-school hours become a second site of compounding inequality.
Who benefited: White suburban children, whose afternoons are safe, supervised, and increasingly enriched by organized extracurricular activity. Their non-school hours are an extension of their educational advantage.
Who was excluded: Urban and rural poor children, whose after-school hours are unsupervised and under-resourced; Black families systematically excluded from the suburban neighborhoods where the postwar childhood was being built; working-class children whose mothers’ labor left them alone after three o’clock.
With Change Comes Resistance: The Leisure Gap Widens (1970s–1990s and beyond)
As the institutional history of education produces its backlash—against busing, against equity funding, against the framing of school as a site of redistribution—the same dynamic plays out in the texture of children’s daily lives. When public recreation programs are cut, they are cut in the name of fiscal responsibility. When after-school programs lose funding, the loss is framed as an unfortunate necessity. The cumulative effect is that the public infrastructure of childhood—the commons of play, the shared recreational space, the after-school program that any child could attend—quietly contracts, and the private infrastructure of childhood expands to fill the gap, accessible only to those who can pay for it.
This is not accidental. The same political grammar that converts equity funding in schools into an unfair advantage converts public investment in children’s time into government overreach. The playground, the public pool, the after-school program—these are all, in the backlash framing, things that responsible families provide for themselves. Public provision is for families who failed to provide. The logic individualizes what is structurally produced, and then blames the individual for the structural outcome.
By the 1990s, the research literature on out-of-school time is documenting what is already obvious to anyone paying attention: children in poverty spend their after-school hours very differently from children with resources, and those differences compound across years into significant gaps in academic preparation, social-emotional development, and college readiness. The response is a wave of after-school program funding—21st Century Community Learning Centers, extended day initiatives—that partially addresses the gap while leaving the underlying inequality untouched.
2000–Present: Scheduled Childhood and the Unsupervised Hours
The contemporary period produces two childhoods in increasingly sharp relief. The first is the fully scheduled childhood of affluent families: school, then sports practice, then music lesson, then homework, then sleep—every hour accounted for, every activity selected for its developmental and resumé value. This childhood is exhausting and productive and deeply anxious. It is also, on the other hand, very good preparation for competitive college admission and the professional-managerial economy that follows.
The second childhood has no such schedule. It is the childhood of children whose families lack the money, time, or stability to organize their non-school hours. It is spent on phones, in front of screens, in apartments, or in neighborhoods where the outdoor infrastructure of play has been allowed to deteriorate. It is not necessarily an unhappy childhood—children are resourceful—but it is not building toward the same outcomes. The difference between these two childhoods, played out across millions of families, is one of the primary mechanisms by which inequality reproduces itself across generations while appearing to result from individual choices.
The school day has lengthened in many districts—particularly those serving high-poverty populations, where extended day programs have been implemented as an equity intervention. The journey to school has shifted: in urban areas, a growing number of children are driven rather than walking, reversing the pedestrian norm of earlier eras and further sorting children by the access their families have to a car and flexible time. Remote learning during COVID collapsed the boundary between school time and home time entirely—with consequences that followed the same distributional lines as everything else. Children with quiet space, adult supervision, and reliable broadband managed. Children without those things largely did not.
Play, as an unstructured and self-directed activity, is declining across class lines—but most sharply for the children who have historically relied on it most. Recess is being cut in schools under academic pressure. Outdoor play in neighborhoods is declining due to parental safety concerns that are partly real and partly a function of media-amplified fear. The physical and developmental consequences of this decline are well-documented and not evenly distributed.
The baseline: Two divergent childhoods separated by money. The affluent child’s non-school hours are maximally structured and developmentally intentional. The poor child’s hours are under-resourced and unsupervised. The school day is lengthening in high-poverty districts as a compensatory measure. Unstructured play is declining everywhere.
Who benefited: Children of wealthy families, whose after-school hours function as a second, private educational system. Their non-school time compounds their advantage.
Who was excluded: Children in poverty, whose unstructured hours are the most visible symptom of everything the public system declined to provide. Children in under-resourced neighborhoods where the infrastructure of play—the park, the pool, the after-school program—has been allowed to deteriorate.
The Through-Line
The history of what children do outside school is not separate from the history of school. It is the same history, told from the other side of the door. In every era, children who benefited most inside the school building also had the most outside it: more time, more space, more safety, more supervision, more materials, more adult attention, more room to be children rather than workers or caretakers or simply left alone. The children who benefited least inside the building had the least outside it. The gap between the two was not a gap in effort or aptitude—it was a gap in what the society was willing to organize and provide.
What the school can do is always bounded by what it cannot reach. The child who arrives hungry, exhausted from an unsafe commute, responsible for younger siblings, carrying the anxiety of household instability—that child is not starting from the same place as the child who arrives rested, fed, driven by a parent, and free from adult responsibility for the next seven hours. The school day measures from bell to bell. The field of education begins much earlier, and runs much later, and is shaped by forces the school rarely controls and almost never names.
A genuine alternative to this history would have to account for what happens outside the building—not as a supplementary concern, but as a structural one. The hours between 3—6pm are not separate from the school day. They are its extension.
here’s the thing that’s so hard to reconcile as i move into the last third of my life:
as much as i appear to my peers to overshare about my inner life, i feel like a tentative teenager when i consider the world i thought i would find myself in as an adult human,
growing up as i did on the expressive output of people whose writing i resonated with:
walt whitman, a.a. milne, gertrude stein, e.e. cummings, countee cullen, langston hughes, henry miller, anaïs nin, julio cortázar, charles bukowski, james baldwin, jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, frank o’hara, kenzaburō ōe, anne sexton, sylvia plath, audre lorde, angela davis, maya angelou, david bowie, jim harrison, erica jong, jim carroll, eve babitz, kate bush, prince, kathy acker, dorothy allison.
the world was supposed to be more gay, more unmasked, more nuanced, more accepting of complexity, more nonbinary. we were supposed to have seen through the inhuman demands of industrial capitalism. we were supposed to find ourselves on the other side of the world we had inherited. we were supposed to have embraced obvious but nontraditional solutions. we were supposed to have found family in people willing to be authentically themselves.
we were supposed to not get mad when someone disrupted the narrative. we were supposed to welcome disruption of the narrative.
instead, we find ourselves beholden to the productivity cult, to getting-things-done, to apologizing for oversharing, to wondering how to monetize our downtime and create passive income, to figuring out how to remain relevant. to deciding how many dead children are a fair trade. to fitting our expressions into a platform, our visibility decided by an algorithm. to sidelining the skills we invested skin in when we were young. to surviving in this economy, in the richest country the world has ever known. to choosing whether it’s worth the effort to just be authentic.
what. the. fuck. happened?
and why is what i am doing considered oversharing, when i feel like i’m late to the game, and barely scratching the surface, just saying the things i think are supposed to be obvious?
do you feel me? am i an old mf, shouting at a cloud?
I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.
I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.
I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.
I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.
With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.
But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).
Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.
The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.
I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.
We have been acculturated to the language of equity masking a reality that simply doesn’t add up.
When a business is telling you they pay a living wage, 9 times out of 10 they either don’t understand the term or they are gaslighting you. This is allowed to happen because most people don’t do the math, and most people over a certain age grew up in a very different ecosystem.
Living wage for the East Bay is $100,000/yr. Most people think that looks like a big number, but if you figure for living alone in a market rate apartment, current food, utility, and healthcare costs, $100k is modest at best. Living wage, then, if you factor in 50 40-hour workweeks, a living wage is $50/hr. It’s just that simple. So if you’re working anywhere that’s paying $20/hr, the only way that’s a living wage is if you have another job paying far above $50/hr to make up for the deficit that is created by working a $20/hr job. And it’s clear that most small businesses would not be able to pay the equivalent of $50/hr full time for most positions.
Life no longer adds up. When I was my son’s age, I could work less than full time at a cafe and pay all of my rent and bills and save money and travel a few weeks a year. My son works at an equivalent job, and doesn’t have enough to rent an apartment.
We can battle with small business owners all day. It doesn’t add up. That’s why everyone is trying to unionize, and getting tons of pushback. If we don’t solve income inequality, places like the East Bay will just become unlivable for the average person.
About tip culture: Because I’ve worked lots of restaurant and service jobs, I don’t buy into the “tipping as a reflection of service quality” mindset, and see tipping for what it is—a wage subsidy for low paid workers. Tipping-as-merit is a way to make the consumer think like a privileged person—the power to bestow and withhold is intoxicating, until you recognize the reality that low paid workers often simply couldn’t afford to work their jobs without tips factored in, because employers, due to margins being what they are, simply wouldn’t be able to pay what a worker needs to make without that subsidy.
Because it’s become part of the ecosystem, it buries a portion of the cost of doing business—in other words, consumers would be unwilling to pay the price that businesses would have to charge for goods and services if they reflected the actual cost of doing business. Understanding this, I automatically add 20% whenever I’m at an establishment where I know the workers are making a lower-tier wage; but first, I ask an employee how the management distributes tips—some businesses keep them outright, while others distribute them equitably.
I’m writing this as a person who has never earned what has been considered a living wage for the area. Rent control, beans and rice, and making sure to never become sick or injured are all that are allowing me to stay in the area.
Please vote! And remember that as long as capitalism doesn’t have safeguards that manage the ratio between the highest and lowest earners, things can only get worse.
I was recently trying to explain equity in education to someone who experiences language around equity as “mumbo jumbo,” (in their words). My mind makes analogies, and tries to find common ground. As we (me and my debate partner) are both Californians, my mind latched onto car culture—Americans love their cars, and California has a specific stake in the dissemination of car culture. Also, there is a deep relationship between car culture, social structure, and education culture, and, for reasons that will become clear, the Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, is a major player in this landscape, and works elegantly as a character in my story.
Thanks for bearing with my complex sentences. Neurodivergents love sentences with bonus content.
Recognizing that this metaphor might be helpful for others, I submit to you: the difference between equality and equity in education.
You have a central auto shop system, implemented around the country, set up by the Ford Motor Corporation when they were the dominant maker in the marketplace. You advertise that you will work on any make and model of car. That being said, when the shop is set up, the shop only receives shop manuals for the Ford Taurus. So for a while, any car that comes through the shop gets spark gaps, valve clearances, and timing settings for the Ford Taurus.
At some point, the vehicle owners, the shop managers, and the mechanics notice that all of the Tauruses that leave the shop are running great, but the Focuses, the Transits, the Broncos and Mustangs, along with Chevys, Dodges, Jeeps, Subarus, Kias, Volvos and Land Rovers are not running their best.
A shop manager from Ford comes in to investigate. “I see your problem right here: All of these cars are being tuned to Taurus specs. Where are your shop manuals for the other models?” They order the manuals for the Focus, Transit, Bronco and Mustang, and lo and behold, every Ford that leaves the shop runs at its best.
The other makes still have timing issues, are not firing on all cylinders, and experience electrical problems. The Ford Motor Corporation claims that this is evidence that the other makes are just deficient.
At some point, a team of independent investigators, with an understanding of the wider market, looks into how the shop is servicing its vehicles. They see right away that no shop manuals or supply chains are being made available for non-Ford vehicles. They submit their recommendations: that manuals, parts, and training specific to non-Ford makes and models be provided immediately, and that this will result in a) all vehicles being tuned to the proper specs; and b) all vehicles receiving appropriate parts, without the need for modifying inappropriate parts or fudging adjustments.
There are many Ford-only communities working on the same shop model, and all of their vehicles appear to be doing fine. The Ford Motor Corporation, having set up the shop model in the first place, with significant influence and a vested interest in their vehicles appearing to be the most reliable, moves decisively to thwart these findings and advocate for the Ford-only model to be enforced throughout the country.
A few communities that service a wide variety of makes and models adopt the independent investigators’ findings: they provide manuals and supply chains that ensure that all vehicles leaving the shop are running at their best.
The Ford Motor Corporation sees this as a threat to their ascendancy in the marketplace, and they advocate strongly that only Ford manuals and supply chains be standard, and that other accommodations are simply designed to steal market share from a native maker and transfer it to makers who are encroaching and have no claim to a place in the market.
They never point out that serving each vehicle to its unique specifications does not make Fords run worse—it simply ensures that each vehicle runs at its best. No one is asking that Chevys be supercharged, or that Subarus get special fuel injectors, or that Dodges get enhanced suspension. It’s just about servicing each vehicle with the appropriate parts and adjustments.
Equality is treating each car like a Ford Taurus. A move toward equity without actually achieving equity is treating each car as some model of Ford. Equity is providing the proper parts and tuning for every make and model that comes through the shop.
Equality is treating each vehicle the same. Equity is treating each vehicle like itself.
Someone who says, “but children are not as different as different makes of cars” has a fundamental misunderstanding of the trajectories that different children travel before they enter the education system. Some people have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance that every child has had access to the same resources and comes from backgrounds with the same cultural expectations. This is similar to maintaining the appearance that all cars are Fords. Only the Ford ecosystem benefits from this. By treating all cars equally (as if they were Fords) we are not treating them equitably (by giving them the parts and adjustments specific to their needs).
The Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, provides a good analogy for the foundation of our education system. Like Henry Ford, (the parent of the factory model of human organization), the people who designed the sorting system that is expressed in standardized testing in education were racists, eugenicists, capitalists, and anti-unionists. They designed a sorting mechanism that recognized the need for low-paid workers, middle managers, and highly paid executives, and devised a shop system that was predicated on labeling these social tiers early, and making sure everyone stayed in their lane.
Being a diverse and unevenly distributed nation, we have what are essentially Ford-only communities—communities that are predominantly white and culturally homogeneous—alongside mixed-make communities—communities that include a vast variety of different cultural and relational realities, as different as different makes of cars.
The culture wars around education are really an expression of different priorities regarding a variety of specific needs, and a breakdown in the translation layer between understanding the diverse needs of different models of vehicle and a variety of makes of vehicles—between communities loyal to the Ford ecosystem and open-market communities.
Since single-make communities exist, distributed throughout the country, there is a significant voice within the national conversation that advocates for the Ford-only model. Consider a variety of predominantly white Anglo communities throughout the US:
Provo, Utah
Bismarck, North Dakota
Owensboro, Kentucky
Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Rutland, Vermont
Southlake, Texas
Findlay, Ohio
Florence, Alabama
Altoona, Pennsylvania
Medford, Oregon
Alongside this homogeneous cultural distribution, just as widely represented and on the ascendancy, are the open-market communities, where a variety of makes and models are part and parcel of everyday life:
Dearborn, Michigan
Flushing, Queens, New York
Lowell, Massachusetts
Anchorage, Alaska
Houston, Texas
Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota
Oakland, California
Clarkston, Georgia
Garden City, Kansas
Miami, Florida
Viewed in this way, the culture wars we are experiencing are not so much about a competition for resources, but simply a difference in scale of specific needs. For those acculturated to a monoculture, there is a cognitive load required to understand the needs of a more diverse community. And this cognitive load becomes weaponized by actors who have a stake in maintaining a monoculture.
This is the Ford Motor Corporation’s most effective move: not the shop design itself, but the management of the conversation about it. By framing equity as a threat to Ford drivers, they redirect the legitimate frustration of communities whose own Broncos and Transits are sitting in the remedial bay—tuned to Taurus settings, diagnosed as deficient—toward the communities asking for their own manuals. The Bronco in Altoona and the Kia in Oakland are being failed by the same structure. They have been positioned as opponents. The people who benefit from the Taurus-only model funded that positioning.
The Ford Motor Corporation’s original pitch was simple: bring us any make, any model. We’ll get it running. Equity doesn’t challenge that pitch—it holds the Ford Motor Corporation to it. The independent investigators found nothing that undermines Ford’s stated goals. They found only that those goals were never applied fairly. Serving the Kia to its own specifications doesn’t make the Taurus run worse. It makes the shop better. The players in the open market that Ford made possible are simply asking the Ford Motor Corporation to honor the contract it wrote.
Equity is not the subversion of the shop’s mission. It is, finally, its fulfillment. Aren’t we better, together, when each is at their best?
Let’s take a moment to say something out loud: there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world; and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons many of our kids are not excited
to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,
someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not important enough to take the time to craft. Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to: Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;
Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find a rhyme, if they know that one is coming: (you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when
the person reading leaves out the last word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?) (If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend). When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad
were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited memory to do the work of storytelling, passed from tongue to tongue for about as long
as Europeans have occupied the Americas– you might start to wonder which skills we should be focusing on, when passing information along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.
You can do the human math–(I’ve done it, and with confidence can say what I’m going to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most of the poets and writers of ages past were people
who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent; for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm was just the way they knew their brain would remember it; and in doing so, made the event accessible
to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen, you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow; the calming force of human expectation, and satisfaction of expectation, over,
and over, and over, and over, and over again, like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders, that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount of time. (who has time for that, these days?)
When a child grows up in an environment where there is only one source of support, and that source of support is unpredictable, unstable, and capable of harm, the child’s identity becomes tied to that of the person they rely on. They may learn that if they go along with their caregiver, their needs will not be met. In this case, it can actually be a successful adaptation to learn to counter the caregiver, if that means getting their needs met.
The problem arises when this child never gets the experience of being supported by a field–by the wider community. They lose their ability to form bonds with a variety of people who might meet their needs in more healthy ways. Their whole identity calcifies into a constant state of opposition to the only person they recognize–their unstable, unpredictable, possibly abusive caregiver.
Sound familiar? We see this type of dynamic within families all the time. We also see it in our national politics, and more and more on the international stage as well. Leaders and governments are galvanized around opposition to some party, population, or set of policies. In doing so, they lose their ability to live in the world of phenomena: the only thing that exists is that to which they are opposed. It’s toxic, maddening, heartbreaking – overwhelming to anyone paying attention.
So what do we do, when this state of affairs arises? Providing coherence, context, nuance only gives more information to be pushed against. In psychology, there is the idea of triangulation: ceasing to engage in dyadic entrapments and focusing instead on a shared field of engagement.
We have had many opportunities to form cross-cognitive bonds with those who are oppositional by constitution: nuclear proliferation, climate change, Covid 19: these all appear to be the kinds of existential threats that we can unite around. Unfortunately, this is a cognitive bias, not a rational train of thought. None of these threats are fast-moving enough that we can recognize the danger before forming an opinion about it. This opinion gets formed by the same framework that locks us into oppositional mode in the first place.
I’m more and more convinced that only a fast-moving apex predator like Godzilla will be recognized as a force of triangulation that we can unite around opposing. In fact, the original Godzilla film from 1954 had a humanist, anti-nuclear subtext, which, of course, was stripped out when the film entered the US market.
Perusing reddit today, I noticed someone posted about wanting to start a men’s group and asking for fun ideas. Many of the comments were followed by an enthusiastic “yes!” or other signifiers of feeling seen. Nothing in the post spoke to my identity or special interests.
I don’t point this out to knock anyone’s interests. On the contrary, seeing people feeling inspired to get together and create community is one of my special interests, so I shared in the joy, even though I recognized that this particular group would not be a group where I would feel seen.
And I recognize that even though I present as a man, if I were to advertise and start a men’s group, both the people who showed up and myself would likely end up feeling awkward. I would likely have to do a lot of masking to appear as if I was feeling in my element, which pretty much defeats the purpose of a support group based on gender presentation.
On a whim, I did a search for [women’s group] in the same subreddit. There were several different threads, and, unsurprisingly to me, the activities and issues being described felt much more akin to my nature. I didn’t get that feeling of “yes!,” though, or if I started to it was tempered by the understanding that regardless of how I feel on the inside, or the activities I enjoy, or the topics I like to talk about, I likely would not be regarded as a part of the community were I to attend unannounced. I get it, but again, I’m left feeling unseen.
In my life, one of the most-asked questions I’ve received about my identity is “are you gay?” Remember, gender and sexual preference are not the same. I think what people might be picking up on is that while I present as a man, I don’t feel that I inhabit a male identity that resembles the men I see around me. Does that make me a trans person. I don’t know, honestly.
Because gender is a social construct, the rules of gender presentation are created (mostly without awareness) by the community. For example, there might be a group for trans adults who would hear my description of myself and feel that I am like them – we see one another and feel seen – we are relationally similar. Another group of trans people might have a different sense of what it means to be trans – they might recognize me more were I to feel a strong need to present on the outside in ways that align with my feminine insides. They might tell me, “you’re not trans: you’re bigender.” I might take their word for it.
Because gender is a social construct, my autistic mind generally either doesn’t see the structure that people around me see (because I just see information, and coherence comes later), or, seeing it, immediately tries to deconstruct it and question it’s validity. When people ask me things like “are you gay?,” I take it kind of like people asking “how are you?” From years of trial-and-error, I’ve recognized that in most cases, people don’t really want to know the answer. They want to feel safe. They want to get just enough information so that they know how to be and not offend anyone. They want to be able to place me, within the list of categories they have devised for people to fit into.
More and more, I’m comfortable being unplaced. I recognize that it’s a valid and valuable state of being. (Maybe that makes me nonbinary. You’d have to decide: I’ll totally come to your nonbinary social group, if you recognize me as such and invite me). I suspect that if more people were comfortable being unplaced, being who they are, then there would not be as much controversy around what to me is a thoroughly uncontroversial reality. Some people take their social constructs very seriously, and conformity is a life-or-death affair. When I notice someone like this, from my unplaced state (these are often the people who ask if I’m gay, as if they would be totally unphased if I walked up to them and asked them if they are straight), I find myself relying on my white, male, large-bearded-man privilege (regardless of feeling like a terrified little girl inside), and, when the question comes, I often will ask them, “what makes you ask?,” or, “what does gay mean?” This is a much more efficient way of shutting down an awkward conversation than just not engaging. Were I smaller, and more feminine, and non-white, I might not feel as safe to be that direct.
And that’s been the case for most of my life: my big giant man disguise helps keep the frail, frightened girl inside safe, protected from the harsh realities that girls face in our society. It’s kind of a remarkable arrangement, actually. Sometimes I do feel like it would be amazing to have a body manifest that appears the way my insides feel. And on the flip side, I think it would be amazing to feel what it was like on the inside for a person who thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world to show the fish they just caught on their dating profile – my body is well-suited for that mindset.
But mostly, I just think it’s a good idea to let people be who they see themselves to be – on the inside, on the outside, relationally, emotionally, all the ways. And to allow ourselves to be a little unplaced, ourselves.
Who am I? That’s up to us. Let’s try to make it a pleasant arrangement.
