Healing Our Way Out of This: Thoughts on Kids in Crisis

The Washington Post recently reported that since 1999, more than 278,000 children have experienced gun violence, not an insignificant amount of it in and around schools. What would John Dewey or Maria Montessori say about seeing their bags pass through metal detectors upon entering a school surrounded by armed guards? Likewise, what would Horace Mann’s reaction be to school board meetings that end with police having to remove belligerent parents venting their frustrations at board members? The pathology of estrangement and isolation, like a new strand of virus, is at large in America.

Whether due to gun violence, underfunding, or the recent disturbing slate of assaults and threats to school leaders around mask policies, our schools have long been in red alert; the pandemic has only exacerbated the situation. The cognitive and emotional strain borne by teachers and students is deeply troubling. According to the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, “Young people are facing devastating mental health effects” as a result of the pandemic, attested to by record cases of disruptive behavior in schools. Paralleling the attrition striking the health care field, teachers are leaving the workforce and principals are taking early retirement. 

How can we help kids through the crisis of their lives? How do we help each other? Krista Tippett, creator and host of the National Public Radio show and podcast On Being, suggests that we “walk beyond what we’ve been living through, and to remaking a world.” Are we up to that in our schools? Can we muster the deep intelligence and vision necessary to redefine, with our students, the meaning of happiness and well-being? Can we draw on “the sustaining and calculated ferocity” that Toni Morrison says is necessary “in times of deep deep trouble … to preserve the things we love”?

I’m no expert on well-being. Nor am I a social worker or someone with a clinical background in psychology. My credentials are four decades in schools and community spaces. My lens is the lives of children, teens, young adults, and teachers. I am a serial school head who has been around the block enough to distinguish a strong, caring culture from a mediocre one. I’ve learned how rare the word well-being is in classrooms and staff lounges, and how central human connection should be to any discussion about education and mental health. That’s a profound disservice to students, teachers, and administrators. More important than all the intruder lock-down drills is a smile at the front door, a high five in the morning, or a hug at circle time – anything that conveys a sense of community and belonging. Connection is elemental and essential, and the impact is longitudinal. 

Schools need to know and apply what neuroscience and cognitive psychology have discovered about learning and the elasticity of the brain. Instead of cramming kids’ heads with static knowledge, we can help them find pathways to their passions and interests. With the advances in what we know about cognitive, social, and emotional development, we can intentionally teach kids to be kind, collaborative, and caring. There are numerous tools and apps to aid in the teaching of well-being, such as a suite of resources that has come out of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin.

But we need more than that. The language of well-being has to be a primary concept and practice in school and community spaces. Right now, it isn’t. The prevailing vernacular is military and defensive: lockdowns, shelter in place, social distancing. As long as kids are still labeled and disabled by a system that undervalues human dispositions other than competitiveness and acquisitiveness, we will all be at risk. We need to unlearn looking for what is wrong with our students and then “fixing them” as we have all been trained to do, and instead look at them with all the humility it takes to discover what’s right and special about them. A sense of belonging accrues when children are appreciated and honored. The same goes for their teachers, and a school culture that appreciates and honors its teachers will cultivate those values from the ground up.

To humanize our schools is to cultivate deliberate and strategic ways to build well-being into them by strengthening essential human and community connections. One way is for community spaces and schools to codify associations and friendships between generations that allow children and older adults to work together and contribute to their communities in meaningful and impactful ways; nothing corrodes self-worth more quickly than feeling like one has no value, usefulness, or place in the world. This is true for people at every stage of life. From community gardens and food pantries to life coaching and mentoring, such initiatives can foster connection and belonging and restore a part of our mental health ecology that was broken decades ago. 

Every kid needs to have emotional reinforcement from adults who are strategically positioned to observe and watch over them. We need a one-to-one policy, not for technology, but for developing happy and confident human beings. Now is the time to make well-being a part of schools’ everyday vocabulary–something that good schools, daycares, kindergartens, and early elementary programs have done for time immemorial. It’s called circle time. Or morning meeting. Or choral singing or group play. And the need for this most basic check-in doesn’t stop at age eight. We can build new emotional musculature by providing multiple ways to support children and adults in developing emotional fluency and capacity for living with uncertainty and change. To find out how, see the work of advocacy and think tank organizations such as Practice of Life and Greater Good.

Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s great intellectuals, described the meaning of education as “the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it,” and “where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world.” We have come close to ignoring her sage advice. Any reasonable vision for education in a post-pandemic world has to include love, healing, and a sense of reparation – between people and people, people and nature, people and places. Ours is the first generation in human history to deny the possibility of a future to our children. We have work to do, work that does not expel our children from the world but instead gives them the hope, voice, and vision to rebuild it.