One of my colleagues’ children attended a Montessori school for a time.
The child, let’s call him Jay, was four years old. Jay and his classmates were assigned jobs to help the classroom. So far, so good; if you have any experience of Montessori (or indeed most preschools), this will not be surprising. This school, however, took the rather odd approach of determining that classroom jobs should not be rotated or shared. For each child, there was one (specific and forever) job, all year long.
This frozen-in-time allocation of roles necessarily assumes either that all jobs are equal or that all children are not. One of the assigned jobs was “feed the fish.” Another was “set out napkins for snack and meal times.” And still another of those jobs was “clean the bathroom,” which meant checking throughout the day to ensure that bathroom floors and surfaces were kept free of toilet paper, tissues, and spills, and flushing toilets whenever any other preschooler themselves forgot.
One of these jobs is not like the others, right? And yes, “bathroom helper” was assigned to an actual preschooler. For the entire year. Eventually, Jay complained- it was a heavy lift, it felt gross to him, and also, like most of us, he wanted to feed the fish. Jay’s mother, hearing of her child’s conundrum, imagined that a misunderstanding must have occurred, and she went to talk to the school. And this is where she, and by association, we, learn a lesson, which is that schools, even where they are small and independent institutions steeped in the Montessori method, are also systems, and systems operate under multiple governing ideologies simultaneously.
Some of these organizing principles will be evident and perhaps even articulated with clarity and intention; others will prove nearly invisible even as they bind people and objects with the gravitational pull of a black hole.
What might be the governing ideologies relevant to this particular case?
Here in the United States in the early 2020s it might be instructive to know that Jay, the child assigned to clean the bathroom, is a person of color. We might also find it useful to consider that Jay was one of only two brown kids in the entire school that year.
And we might also find it interesting to know that the teachers apparently had some concerns about the job they had assigned, in that part of their refusal to rethink role allocations hinged on the idea that it would be unfair for any other child to have to clean the bathroom. Jay, they argued, should keep the bathroom job specifically because it would be unkind of him to wish it upon anyone else.
Let’s frame this as clearly as possible in terms of the arguments being made: Jay’s teachers (and with them, the school and its administrative systems), argued first in effect and then out loud that there had to be a short end of the stick. In other words, in their view the context that we create within a preschool classroom simply could not be fair. Note that this is actually two arguments, wrapped together: unfairness and insolubility. We are thus invited to accept unfairness not as something that we ourselves may have created and needlessly introduced, and which we might therefore thoughtfully imagine our way past, but as a structural given of the universe. If unfairness is fundamentally irresolvable, its conditions must simply be accepted in the way that people “accept” the laws of physics.
United States economic structures are predicated on our accepting of exactly these things, so it’s not surprising that, even where we can do the mental gymnastics to imagine an alternative structure, the “life isn’t fair and all efforts to the contrary are sophomoric and futile” framework is a well camouflaged backdrop for most of us.
The structural wrestling doesn’t end here, however. There is also a distributive conversation to be had.
We see that distributive negotiation, which we might call “whose problem should the unfairness be?,” where the teachers attempt to shame Jay—himself a child—into keeping an unfair and inferior job with a “Think of the children!” argument. What the school is saying here is that, given that unfairness is inherent within the container called preschool, some people are more properly made to carry the impacts of that unfairness than others.
The school didn’t feel it possible, or at least did not find it necessary, to imagine differently, but we ourselves can. How might we have built something better?
In the simplest and most concrete terms, one obvious answer is that we needn’t have a child bathroom helper. That role could simply not exist, and what would happen then? Would the bathrooms still need to be ‘helped?’ Certainly, and the people who would then be responsible are the adults.
Classroom cleaning jobs are either invented duties- they are jobs that exist only so that a child can do them, and if the child disappears, so with him goes the job that was created simply to guide and occupy his hands- or they are delegated duties. Delegated duties are those that ultimately belong to someone at a higher level, and this is the case with all of the actual work needed to make a preschool classroom function. You can delegate caring for the classroom pets, but the ultimate responsibility lies, indelibly, with the teacher. And “clean the bathroom,” like “clean the carpets” and also “maintain ultimate professional and legal responsibility for the well-being of the classroom,” is a task that begins and ends with the responsibilities of adults. It is not a child’s job. It does not need to become a child’s job. And with that recognition, this thing that we could pretend is insoluble and unavoidably unfair recedes quickly into the background and away from the concerns of children. No child need clean the bathroom.
And how, then, might we solve the second part of this problem: if Jay isn’t to do an adult job, how will we find an appropriate children’s job for him? Friends, we will simply make one up, the same as the others! There could be two snack helpers- the kindergarten classroom where I once taught had four. At one time.
And of course, the entire job structure itself could be abolished- it was handed down neither by Montessori nor, before her, by God.
Or, as the child’s mother assumed and then suggested, jobs could simply be rotated.
But no, the school explained, none of this could happen. The impasse carried blame from the school toward the family: why aren’t you accepting this system which is really what is required, though imperfect? Why can’t you do your part so that all can get maximum benefit, and yes, this system is not fair, but we all go forward together. Not, mind you, we all get free together. Simply, we all go forward.
Jay’s family, making no headway with the school, made plans to transfer him from the program. In the days leading up to his departure, the adults in the classroom simply ceased speaking to him. A child. Jay was, by that point, a mere proxy for a larger point: you are failing to cooperate with what the system requires, and your lack of cooperation is inconveniencing others, which is like harm.
This is a story about negotiating burdens—who will carry the weight of our shared life?
Let’s talk for a moment about system burdens.
We become a “we” to do things that we couldn’t do alone. Creating those things requires inputs- we might think of these as resources, actions, commitments, and abstentions. To reap a benefit beyond what our own hands and this current moment can deliver, we must agree to become responsible to the future. We become, in some sense, responsible to other people. We become responsible for outcomes.
This responsibility and the work (the resources, actions, commitments, or abstentions) that getting to those outcomes entails has to be held by people. We might think of this responsibility and all that comes with it-- the weight of getting things done to shape next realities--as the burden of collective life. And we have, perhaps for as long as we’ve been engaging in collective projects, had to figure out how to apportion this burden.
Should the weight and work be divided equally, or should some people carry more?
Among whom should the burden be divided? Is it the responsibility of all people, everywhere? Should the lion’s share of the burden belong only to those who benefit most directly?
Chattel slavery in the United States arose out of a framework—a theological belief set and the world it then ordered—that argued that landholders at the top of a fiscal system should be burdened as little as possible. Correspondingly, this system argued that people stolen from their families and kept in chains should be burdened as much as possible (both to keep the weight of obligation from being laid other places in the system, and also because this theology believed and reinforced that some bodies particularly deserve burden).
One hundred and fifty years after the end of the civil war, we are still wrestling with who should and should not be burdened. These are value judgments rooted in wishes for ourselves and hopes for our country, and we have more power to decide how things will be than we often think that we do.
So how do we get thinking about burden wrong?
● We forget that as people, we invented the containers that shape and attend our lives.
● We forget that in some sense we asked for much of the burden we carry—that the social contract, implicit though it remains, benefits us in ways that we do choose and that we are able to leverage in maintaining some stability or in making our lives better.
● We forget that people are burdened unequally by existing systems. We overlook differential impact both by overgeneralizing from our own experiences and by discounting the differing experiences of others. (As John Green writes, “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear that someone else has pain is to have doubt.”)
● We forget that if these structures are not adequately serving us, the containers (rules, frameworks, and entire institutions) can be refused or retooled. This awareness, it should be noted, terrifies those who are not carrying their share of burden.
● And we forget that it is our responsibility to think flexibly, creatively, and in a way that centers liberation as we consider how to assign and carry burden to build the world together.
The current American economic system, with its variety of perverse incentives and future-damaging outcomes, maintains its traction where we agree that the world couldn’t possibly be made fairer. “Things could not be different than this; there is only this way, or worse” is the fear-based belief structure that enables extraction from the many to the few. Once we accept this framework, the ethical puzzle in which we live collapses to a single meta-decision: does it better serve me to try to support the many or to be part of the few?
But another world is possible.
And it’s visible, or it isn’t, in the big magic of the preschool classroom, with a structures we create when we believe that everyone can and should get a chance to care for the fish.
j
You have so well examined how people wish to appeal to the whims of fairness rather than confront the demands of justice.
Your response to this is very elegant and insightful. I frankly never got past “what the [expletive] is wrong with this school?!”